
Glass J57fJ.21 

Book -JU-Lt- 

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COPVRICIIT DEPOSIT. 



THE CHRIST THAT IS TO BE 



This book is published in Great Britain under the 

TITLE ''ChRISTUS FuTURUS,'* 



THE CHRIST THAT IS 
TO BE 



BY THE AUTHOR OF 

"PRO CHRISTO ET ECCLESIA'* 



The year is dying in the night 5 
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die. 

4c !(> N< ^ N: 4^ 

Ring out old shapes of foul disease ; 
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold 5 
Ring out the thousand wars of old, 
Ring in the thousand years of peace. 

Ring in the valiant man and free. 
The larger heart, the kindlier hand j 
Ring out the darkness of the land. 
Ring in the Christ that is to be. 

— Tennyson, In Memoriam. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON : MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
1907 

uill rights reser'ved 



LIBRARY of COMGRfSS I 

two CooiM Received | 

SEPX8 »90r 

Cooynfht Entry 

CLAfiS/4 XXC, No. 

COPY 0. 






Copyright, 1907, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1907, 



J. S. Cushlng Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



PREFACE 

This book is only a series of successive efforts 
to think what the gospel of Jesus really is. Each 
line of thought is unfinished, and there is very 
much in what is said that in a mature work 
would be more carefully guarded from miscon- 
struction. These fragments are only published in 
the hope that those who have greater opportunity 
may find in them something to refine and 
complete. 



CONTENTS 

BOOK I 
HIS THOUGHTS AND OUR THOUGHTS 

CHAPTER I 



PAGE 



Our Need of Reformation ..... 3 

Jesus meant his salvation to become universal. If the race pro- 
gresses, that which will be its final satisfaction cannot have been 
fully comprehended at the beginning. 

An era of higher spiritual and physical life would enable us to 
accept the standard of Jesus. To this end a higher level of 
corporate faith is needed. 

We cannot yet see our way to accept his standard, but our sin lies 
in our determination to walk by sight. 



CHAPTER II 

The Vital Age . . . . . , .15 

The converts of the first age of the Church had only such reports 

of Jesus as a fair consensus of opinion among New Testament 

critics now gives us. 
We may find in it more vital inspiration than in the doctrinal 

systems which in intervening centuries have perhaps made the 

personal character of Jesus more difficult of access. 
If these systems be true for us, we shall, in finding Jesus, return to 

them. 
Rediscovering the personal Jesus in the first reports of his ministry, 

we may aspire to fill this age with as great a comparative advance 

of the Church as the first century exhibited. 

vii 



viii CONTENTS 

CHAPTER III 



PAGE 



The Actions of Jesus . . . . . .20 

If " for this world the word of God is Christ " the words the Christ 

spoke can only be part of his message. 
By obedience to his words we shall be justified or condemned, but 

it was by his works that he asked us to judge of him. 
By his actions, whose significance does not depend on their being 

miraculous, Jesus teaches the power of his presence, and that the 

will of God is directed against suffering as against sin. 



CHAPTER IV 
Faith ......... 30 

Faith is a true estimate of those qualities of personality which are 

hidden from sense. 
A man's faith depends, not only on his own qualities, but also on 

the standard of corporate faith. 
A man cannot measure his own faith or that of another. 
The only test of faith is its result. 



CHAPTER V 
Corporate Faith ....... 44 

The race is a corporate unity. The laws of corporate thought are 
universal, and must govern the condition of the Church. 

Church and world are alike affected by mental epidemics and popular 
reform movements. 

Therefore the Church can only be pure in the degree that she puri- 
fies the world, be at peace as she pacifies the world, comprehend 
truth as she teaches the world to comprehend it. 

The degree of isolation proved desirable for any community does 
not counteract the invisible influence of the world's thought 
upon it, 

CHAPTER VI 
The Doctrine of Prayer , . . . .56 

Jesus sets forth his doctrine of prayer in his works. 

He teaches a constant procession of life from God to the world. 

This life gives physical and mental health, the knowledge of 

forgiveness, and the desire to live and die for men. 



CONTENTS ix 



PAGE 



God's action is invariable : the reception of his gifts depends on 
man's faith. Man need never be uncertain as to God's will ; 
it is in man's will that uncertainty is found, and God will never 
coerce the wills of men. 



CHAPTER VII 

The Place of the Kingdom in the Struggle to 

Survive ....... 70 

As a unit, or a part of a limited corporate unit, man survives by 
fighting and getting. 

But the potentially universal unit, called by Jesus the kingdom of 
heaven, can only be formed by men who cultivate the faculties 
of loving and giving to the atrophy of hate and greed. 

Until this unit becomes universal the individualism and party 
spirit of the world will oppose it. Therefore the children of 
the kingdom — the Church — will suffer persecution 5 but it is 
only as the suffering is incidental to loving and giving, and is 
freed from all spirit of retaliation, that it goes to increase the 
sway of the kingdom. 

It is only by accepting this plan that the human race can survive in 
a higher spiritual environment. 



CHAPTER VIII 
Salvation by Joy . . . . . . .76 

Suffering is incidental and temporary in the scheme of salvation that 

Jesus taught ; joy is of its essence. 
The Christian's suffering is that entailed by the opposition of the 

world-spirit to love. ^ 

The Christian is never commanded to undergo suffering for the sake 

of personal improvement. 



95 



X CONTENTS 

BOOK II 

THE FATHER'S HOUSE 

CHAPTER I 
The Conflict of the Physical and the Moral 

With the growth of a sense of sin the early animal delight in mere 
living vanished. We see in history that men who strove after 
righteousness easily embraced physical evil as a means to that end. 

But Jesus intended his salvation to end the opposition between 
moral and physical welfare. 

CHAPTER II 

The Use of Sin . . . . . . .103 

Sin is a schoolmaster driving men to God. 

Because it exists we are bound to believe that it has its place in 
God's purpose for man's development. But if we believe that 
it is God's will that we should sin, we part with common sense 
and all true religion. 

CHAPTER III 

The Use of Pain. . , . . . .108 

Pain is a schoolmaster driving men to God. 

But if we hold God responsible for pain in any other sense than 
that in which he is responsible for sin, we part company with 
common sense and the doctrine of Jesus. 

If we believe that God deals punitive discipline to men we shall 
do the same. As we are coming to see that the infliction of 
suffering does not produce reformation, we shall be compelled 
to dissociate it from the thought of God's will, and the war 
against all suffering will become as sacred as the war against sin. 

History shows that only those nations have progressed that have 
distinguished between believing that God permits sin and believing 
that he wills it. 

We must now distinguish between the belief that God permits 
suffering and the belief that it is God's wiU. 



CONTENTS xi 



CHAPTER IV 

PAGE 

Fatalism and Asceticism . . . . .119 

The ascription of suffering to the will of God produces a fatalism 
inconsistent with the true genius of Christianity. 

It also produces an asceticism founded on the idea that the endur- 
ance of suffering is to be sought as a means of mere personal 
improvement 5 whereas the only justification for self-denial, and 
the ample field for effort, is the advance of the kingdom. 

The essential difference between both fatalism and asceticism and 
the doctrine of Jesus discussed.^ 

CHAPTER V 
Prophets and Apostles . . . . . .132 

Prophets and apostles were men of their age, whose inspiration is 
seen in their lives, and may be gauged by the life they implanted 
in others. 

If Jesus was in any sense divine, his interpretation of God could 
not have been conditioned by the mind of his age. 

The divine authority and infallibility of Jesus is an intuitive assur- 
ance of the Christian, but may be buttressed by reason. 

Thus ( I ) the unique joy which was the early effect of his message 
to the world goes to prove that he is himself unique. 

(2) So does the fact that his message was transmitted by men 
obviously incapable of completely understanding it, in a form 
which meets the needs of successive generations and enables Jesus 
himself to be increasingly understood. 

Many of our conclusions are based on the assumption that the life 
and words of Jesus have only an inspiration which the inter- 
pretations of his forerunners and followers also possess. We 
need to revise such conclusions, for we do not now believe that 
the writers of the Bible either possessed the insight of Jesus or 
were mechanically inspired. 



CHAPTER VI 

Irreverent Eclecticism . . . , . .147 

We do not use Scripture reverently if we base opinions on texts 
contradicted in their context. 

We find two contradictory theories running through the Old Testa- 
ment and the Epistles concerning God's relation to physical evil. 

The only consistent doctrine is in the words and acts of Jesus. 



xii CONTENTS 



CHAPTER VII 

PAGE 

Dreams of Justice . . . . . .152 

We do not think laws just which condemn the innocent to suffer 
with the guilty. But in life as we know it this must always be. 

Thus our notion of ideal justice never appears to be even approxi- 
mately realised in the world, and, further, the doctrine of Jesus 
would seem to set it aside as negligible. 

We must attribute justice to God, for without it there could not 
be forgiveness, but we have no conception of what divine justice 
may be, and therefore we cannot comprehend divine forgiveness 
from the divine side. 



BOOK III 
GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH 

CHAPTER I 

The Devil and his Angels , . . . .165 

Jesus appears to express a belief in the existence of a separate Evil 
Will, subordinate to God, immanent in man's sin and suffering. 

The common argument that evil cannot be an active force because 
that would involve an unthinkable dualism, is equally an argu- 
ment against man's free will. Therefore, if we believe in free 
will, it is not impossible to believe in the Evil One. 

Whether Jesus, in speaking of the devil and demons, was using 
words in their plain meaning, or speaking in a parable, we 
cannot determine 5 if a parable, the truth set forth must have 
been more, not less, terrible than the figure which conveyed it. 

CHAPTER II 
The Scorn of Superstition . . . .181 

We think in this age we can finally distinguish truth from super- 
stition ; but ancient thought often returns disguised as a newly 
discovered truth. 



CONTENTS xiii 



PAGE 



The ancient belief about disease-demons has suggestive points of 
analogy with what we now know of intrusive disease-germs. 
Although this does not afford any sufficient basis on which to 
build the belief that diseases of the mind may be caused by the 
intrusion of spiritual evil, it suffices to teach us that suspense 
of judgment is the wiser attitude. 

All things have their physical explanation, but that is not necessarily 
an exhaustive explanation, 

CHAPTER III 

The permanent Need of ** Exorcism" . . . 197 

The characteristic of "possession " is loss of self-control. 

Mental compulsions with this characteristic have been common in 

aU times. This illustrated by mental epidemics and chronic 

hysteria. 
We are faced with these undefined evils, half physical, half moral, 

before which the Church is helpless. Whatever be their cause, 

the commission of Jesus clearly includes their cure. 

CHAPTER IV 
Mind and Disease . . . . . .215 

Progressive medical thought tends more and more to recognise the 

use of mind in curing the body. 
It is now maintained that functional diseases may thus be cured, 

but not organic. Further consideration leads to the belief that 

this is not a final word in the matter. 
The unity of nature points to the universal interaction of mind and 

body. 

CHAPTER V 
Faith and the Doctors . . . . .226 

The quarrel between the mind-healer and the doctor has no bearing 

on the bodily salvation Jesus offers. 
Jesus did not condemn any curative agent, and no good doctor can 

condemn any genuine method of cure. 



CHAPTER VI 
The Will of God . . . . . .232 

Jesus taught that health was God's will, that it was an inevitable 
consequence of the right faith. 



xiv CONTENTS 



This truth has been neglected, but we can neglect it no longer 
when the advance of knowledge, by many voices, is telling us 
that body and mind are not two, but one, and that health is 
essential to the complete saint. 



CHAPTER VII 
History of Health by Faith .... 245 

The early Church healed the sick. 

Later the heathen idea that sin had its root in the flesh, which had 
already influenced Judaism, triumphed over the doctrine of Jesus 
that sin was spiritual. Faith in the salvation of the body was 
lost 5 the physical nature was neglected ; and the war between 
science and religion was the result. 

At the time of Jesus the corporate mind easily received the doctrine 
of health by faith. 

To-day the corporate mind has to recover this doctrine, and till it 
does so the individual, save in exceptional cases, cannot rise to it. 



CHAPTER VIII 

The Balance of Nature . . . . .256 

When the growth of physical and spiritual power do not correspond, 
man becomes ill-balanced. 

A Church that persists in wailing that disease is the will of God is 
no worthy successor of the apostles. 

The only basis for the corporate faith that will bring us health is 
the acknowledgment that God wills health for every man with- 
out exception, just as he wills cleanliness and goodness. 



CHAPTER IX 

The Nature Marvels ...... 263 

The "nature miracles" are quite inexplicable, but cannot be 

dissociated from the historic Christ. 
They point to a development of the earthly kingdom to be realised 

by future ages. 
Careful consideration suggests that they will be found not to be 

miraculous. 



CONTENTS XV 



CHAPTER X 

PAGE 

The Conditions of Physical Power . . .274 

Examination of the conditions required for the "miracles," especially 
the ' ' nature miracles, ' ' shows they are closely allied to the direc- 
tions for successful prayer given by Jesus. 

These conditions include perfect amity, individual and corporate, with 
all mankind. 

We cannot fairly draw conclusions from experience of the results 
of prayer offered under militant conditions, or judge the doctrine 
of Jesus by that experience. 



BOOK IV 
HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS 

CHAPTER I 

Fasting and Temptation . , , , .291 

There is record of two world-wide hopes — one, of a Deliverer 

who would perfect man's earthly conditions ; another, of a 

Saviour who would deliver man from earth. 
Whether earth was to be glorified or spurned was a question that 

divided religious thinkers when Jesus came. 
After the experience of his desert fast he never wavered in his 

effort to improve man's physical condition. 
He gave no encouragement to the ascetic principle, but gives 

perfect satisfaction to the hope of the ascetic. 

CHAPTER II 
The Protest of the Parable ' . . . .301 

The Jews were not ignorant of the beliefs and ideas of other nations 
at the Christian era. Jesus saw that the attention of the religious 
world was then fixed on arguments and systems of worship. 



xvi CONTENTS 



In choosing to teach men only by parables Jesus said, in effect — 

it is the life, not the form that is essential. 
Yet form, precise and beautiful, is necessary to a parable, though 

no one particular form is necessary. 

CHAPTER III 

The Fighting Spirit . . . . . .312 

The endeavour to abolish war must begin in our own hearts. We 
must not love invective. We must overcome party spirit. 
Energy is better than mere inertness, for Jesus requires strength 
of purpose. His purpose will utilise all a man's energies. The 
result will be greater individuality, for the law of love gives full 
play to all our powers. 

CHAPTER IV 

The Sword and the Muckrake . . , .326 

Must war always exist ? The change in public opinion within the 
last thirty years suggests hope that it may not. 

Must greed always exist ? The question of a reform of business 
principles is beset with difficulties, but here again individual 
effort to live the business life on the plan of Jesus must precede 
any corporate reformation, and commercial history shows that 
change in the corporate ideal is possible for business men. 



CHAPTER V 

The Protestantism of Jesus . . . . '335 

Jesus taught that sins of the lower nature do not shut men out 
from his salvation as do sins of the higher nature. Of these 
he chiefly condemned the spiritual pride of men who held their 
religious knowledge to be perfect and final. 

As this is a permanent sin of the religious nature there must also 
be a permanent protest of the reformer against existing religious 
standards. This, in an ideal form, is found in the life of Jesus. 

The abuses of Judaism in his time were very great, but Jesus only 
protests against those evils already detected by the Jewish con- 
science. He only treated with neglect doctrines and practices 
which his positive teaching must eventually supersede. 

This principle illustrated by contrasting Jesus and Luther. 

By the prophecies of his unexpected return he taught that the 
Church must be ready to welcome successive reformations. 



CONTENTS xvii 



CHAPTER VI 

PAGE 

The Power of His Death . . . . .349 

In the midst of his gift of complete joy — spiritual, volitional, and 
physical salvation — comes the death of Jesus, the supreme fact 
of his ministry. 

In his death he taught us an earthly thing — to endure all things 
and forgive all things rather than break the law of love. We 
have as yet only partly believed this, and can consequently only 
receive glimpses of the heavenly things his death can teach. 

It gave new reality to the hope of immortality 5 for to feel the life- 
giving power of Jesus is to know that death could be for him 
only transition, and the state where his will is more perfectly 
realised must be the state in which our life will be perfected if 
we attain to it. 

The visions of his resurrection-life show that character and purpose 
pass unchanged through death. How shall we become fitted in 
this life to survive in the environment of his fuller presence ? 

He teaches that his own shall ever share his joy, but the manner 
of his death precludes any doctrine of easy and universal bliss. 

Concerning the lost, Jesus teaches that God suffers with all who 
fail, and is always as kind to the evil as to the good. 

The only salvation he offers us is the offer of himself — his own 
character. How many of us can perceive its beauty ? how many 
approximate to it ? 

We do not yet know what divine justice and forgiveness are, hence 
we cannot know what atonement for sin means. Yet we know 
that it is the vision of the dying Christ, conquering sin and 
death by love, that uplifts the sinner. 

Human reason fails to hear what God says to us in the Crucifixion. 
The Church strives to hear and to interpret. This must ever be 
her function ; but until she has brought the world to be at one 
with her and with Jesus she will not perfectly understand. 



Appendix A . . . . . , . • 375 

Appendix B . . . . . . . -376 

Appendix C . . . , . . . » 37^ 

Appendix D. . , . . . . .381 



BOOK I 
HIS THOUGHTS AND OUR THOUGHTS 



CHAPTER I 

OUR NEED OF REFORMATION 

It is now admitted by New Testament scholars 
that those words of Jesus which appear to treat of 
the society he founded as partial in extent, and 
suggest that the kingdom of heaven would include 
but a few out of the many, refer only to the period 
of the kingdom's growth. From the general 
tenor of his teaching and outlook we gather 
that he thought, not only that he was providing 
a salvation for the whole world, but that his sal- 
vation must ultimately pervade the whole world ; 
and further, that the principles of conduct he laid 
down, the character he exemplified, and the faith 
he revealed, if closely wrought into the lives of 
his followers would most quickly and effectually 
accomplish, not only their own enfranchisement, 
but the enfranchisement of the race. 

Meantime, the reception and transmission of his 
message of deliverance did not depend upon its being 
perfectly comprehended ; and the great proof we 
have of the truth of the earliest traditions concerning 
him is that his followers passed on an ideal which 
they only imperfectly understood. There can be 

3 



4 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i 

little doubt that his figure of coming in the clouds 
with power and great glory meant to him the world- 
wide acceptance of his ideals, which he rightly 
judged to be so far above the ideals of the time 
that ages would be required for their perfect com- 
prehension by human thought. This is reason- 
able; he could not be the Christ of all time were 
It possible for any passing generation to understand 
more than a portion of his ideal. We are com- 
pelled, indeed, to choose between the standard of 
a past age, which must decrease, as all its preachers 
must, in the evolution of life and thought, and the 
God-like standard of a Christ who, because he 
must continually Increase, must in every progres- 
sive generation be imperfectly, but less Imperfectly, 
understood. But a teacher imperfectly understood 
may be obeyed, and the first question of any who 
would understand his doctrine must be concerning 
the doing of his will. 

Jesus came to a suffering and vicious world, 
and proclaimed a God who required from every 
man, whatever his heredity, whatever his 
circumstance, not only the righteousness then 
acknowledged, but a far more vigorous, more 
perfect life; a goodness, not only in action but in 
Imagination, in desire and motive, in every chance 
thought; an earnest purpose of love multiplied by 
every possible opportunity of doing good. 

Such a God asks the impossible. Good men 
on all sides, then and ever since, have arisen to 
welcome the beautiful Ideal and explain that It was 
meant to be Impossible, — a star for moths to de- 
sire, a morrow which humanity would never see, 



CH. I OUR NEED OF REFORMATION 5 

demanded of man by God only in order that his 
creature might constantly strain himself here in 
attempting what he could not perform, to the end 
that he might be a little bigger and a httle better 
hereafter. And for nineteen centuries we have 
been learning more and more clearly that man, 
here and now, is, and since we have any history of 
him always has been, so hampered by the imperfec- 
tions of body and brain, the taint of his fathers' 
fathers, the accidents of his infancy and the 
limitations of his age, as to be quite unable to 
fulfil the law of Christ in any rounded and adequate 
way. Our Christian teachers drew a kindly line 
between deadly and venial sin, until the psycho- 
logists and physiologists told us that some of the 
so-called deadly sins are those for which men are 
least responsible; and now we are taught to 
distinguish between infirmities which must take a 
lifetime to spend their force and thus diminish, 
and faults which can be, and therefore ought to 
be, swiftly cured. More and more we learn that, 
so far from the doom on children's children being 
arbitrary, it is inevitable, so inevitable that the 
man of science and the moralist are at variance 
concerning the cause and nature and cure of crime. 
But Jesus taught that the demand of God for 
righteousness was inexorable. We go back to the 
historic Christ, and we find that he who was more 
tender over human frailty than any other showed 
no recognition of disciples who refused to follow 
where he led. Even after making every allowance 
for the figurative nature of our Lord's sayings, we 
all admit that he made the most stringent demands 



6 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i 

for earnestness of purpose, an earnestness of which 
the average man is physically incapable; for a 
degree of self-devotion which most men's minds are 
unable to admire, much less acquire; for love of 
which most men cannot conceive, let alone feel. 
And we are told that he said, " Every one that 
heareth these sayings of mine and doeth them 
not, shall be likened to a foolish man who built his 
house upon the sand . . . and it fell, and great 
was the fall of it." 

Truly, indeed, great is the fall ! When we 
examine the boasted civilisation of Christendom 
with the searchlight of the precepts of Jesus Christ, 
we see only broken walls upon the sands of com- 
promise. If our faith in social evolution is 
strengthened by the testimony of all history that 
to-day's civilisation is on the whole better than 
anything the world has yet seen, we must still 
admit that it is not Christian, that it is perhaps 
finding its most startling development in a nation 
not even nominally Christian. We cannot for one 
moment suppose that our institutions, or the aver- 
age life of the nominal Christian, are so planned 
that our house can be said to be built upon the 
rock of obedience to the sayings of Christ. 

There are three objections urged against the prac- 
tice of Christ's precepts, — that they are meant only 
to inculcate an inward temper of heart; that they are 
meant only for a certain class ; and that they are for 
private, not public, exercise. Let us consider these. 

Our Lord's ethical teaching presupposes civil, 
domestic, and commercial life. We have the city, 
the court, the officer, the judge, the house, the 



CH. I OUR NEED OF REFORMATION 7 

private room, the lamp, the loaf; or again, the 
master, the servant, the bushel basket,, the field, 
the crop, the market. All these are a part of the 
life to which his injunctions apply, and are used 
as the pith of his illustrations. Those many- 
devotional writers who would remove and limit 
the urgency of our Lord's teaching to the separate 
life of the soul have there a sufficient refutation, 
for in that inner chamber the machinery does not 
exist with which the commands are to be worked 
out. A man or bodv of men in any isolation, 
actual or ideal, could no more obey the great 
Sermon in St. Matthew than a celibate could dis- 
charge a man's duties toward wife and child. 
The peacemaker must live among those who are 
at variance. The meek must have cause of affront. 
The persecuted must face some organised tyranny, 
armed only with the meekness of love. The 
brother to whom exhaustless love is to be contin- 
ually offered must be always at hand, a vain, silly, 
and irritating person; and how is it possible to 
obey the Christian rule toward such an one if 
we do not obey it in the market, in the street, 
in law court, and in religious assembly ^ To sit 
in any hermitage of fact or fancy and exercise a 
heavenly temper is clearly futile, so far as obedience 
to Jesus Christ is concerned; and as futile is the 
more modern method of limiting the benevolent 
energies by zeal in chosen channels, buying thus 
an imaginary license to be good fighters and good 
haters when our theology or liberty is called in 
question. 

Thus it is necessary, in order to live the religious 



8 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i 

life as our Lord directs, that we be part of a 
populace. What virtue is there in humility, 
modesty, and private devotion if the push and press 
of the world's opinions are not upon us ? Why 
should we make a good toilet when we perform 
our self-denials if no one is to be cheered by the 
innocent imposture ? There could be no virtue 
in having no anxiety about our support if we lived 
without worldly responsibility. The "narrow 
gate," the "house upon the rock" are clearly to 
be found only in the busy haunts of men. 

If it is wrong to regard the counsels of per- 
fection as applying only to a temper of soul, it 
is equally wrong to assume that they apply only 
to some apostolic or saintly class. If there be 
any class of Christians on whom these injunctions 
were not laid, we should have to discover what 
rule of life Jesus laid down for their guidance. 
He would seem to have left them totally without 
instruction. His own example cannot be their 
rule, for he carried out to the uttermost his own 
precepts. If there are those to whom it does 
not belong to cast their material cares on God's 
providence, to lend and give to all who ask, 
to love their enemies, then neither is it their 
part to let their light shine, to bring their gift 
to the altar, or to love their neighbours. In the 
whole gospel there is no indication that Jesus 
offers any aid or reward to a partial obedience. 
No man looking back, yielding only part of 
himself, failing to take up the whole burden, is 
fit for the kingdom. If there is a class to whom 
these tests do not apply, there is no parable, or 



CH. I OUR NEED OF REFORMATION 9 

any teaching or action of his, indicating that his 
companionship, his promise, his salvation, are 
for that class. 

Nor is it practical to suppose that the highest 
teaching is intended to inculcate conduct which 
men must imitate in their private capacity, but 
not as members of a social or civic system. 
Nothing could be more unpractical. In every- 
day life a man is as he does. If in every relation 
that binds him to the political and social order 
he is to act at variance with the code of Christ he 
will never be Christ-like. Let us ask how a man 
can divide his private from his public life. We 
are told that the commercial man or wage-earner 
may give lavishly in private, but in the counting- 
house, the workshop, and the field he must not 
be lavish, or he will be endangering his own 
solvency or underselling his neighbours. The 
ordinary tradesman and working-man must, then, 
give up attempting to realise the Christian temper, 
because they have really so little scope for its 
exercise; Sundays and evenings would be outdone 
by the sordid six days of the week, when every- 
thing must be weighed in a nice balance of selfish 
thrift; character would be the outcome of the 
working hours. Again, we are told that a 
statesman may obey the law of love in private 
life, but not in national or international relations. 
But if he be a good statesman all his best thought 
is given to the state, and in the process his 
character develops; as he thinks and acts so he 
becomes. So it is also with the ecclesiastical 
ruler whose churchcraft is governed by the rules 



10 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i 

that will bring the Church earthly success. In 
the end his character will be forged in the heat 
of his work, not in the quiet of his devotional 
hours. 

Perhaps no better illustration of the prevailing 
temper of our Christianity can be had than in a 
quotation from the words of one who is one of 
the best of the Christians and scholars of our 
generation. 

" Christianity — the true Christianity — carries 
no arms; it wins its way by lowly service, by 
patience, by self-sacrifice. History shows that 
there are no instruments of religious propaganda 
comparable to these. It also shows that the type 
of character connected with them is of the very 
highest attractiveness and beauty. Is it a 
complete type, a type to which we can apply the 
Kantian miaxim, ^So act as if your action was to 
be a law for all human beings' .? This would 
seem to be more than we ought to say. ... If 
we are to say the truth we must admit that parts 
of it would become impracticable if they were 
transferred from the individual standing alone to 
governments or individuals representing society^ ^ 
(The italics are ours.) 

If this is the highest degree of belief in the 
common sense of Jesus which seems possible in 
the cathedral close, in the most religious of our 
great universities, can we wonder if we find that 

■^ Art. "Jesus Christ," by Dr. Sanday, Hastings's Dictionary of 
the Bible, p. 621. In the same Art., p. 652, the writer disclaims 
sufficiency for these remarks, and says they only represent such 
insight as we at present have. 



cH. I OUR NEED OF REFORMATION ii 

almost every Christian individual outside that pale 
acts habitually as "representing society/' and not 
as "the individual standing alone'' at the judg- 
ment-seat of Christ ? Yet this pronouncement of 
one of the most revered of Christian thinkers dif- 
fers from the teaching of other Christian preachers 
more in its Christ-like candour, its reverence for 
fact, than in anything else. 

Let each of us ask ourselves if we do not agree 
v^ith it. With our corporate faith in God such 
as it is — a low average estimate of his power, 
a melancholy estimate of his will; with our 
corporate thought regarding God as the source 
of all our diseases and disasters, requiring that 
we shall look to science, not to religion, for their 
cure; with our minds tainted with sin, appetite 
and affection deranged, is it not an impossibility 
to live up to the standards of Jesus, to endure 
persecution with joy and meekness, to overcome 
hate with love, not only in the centre of the 
individual heart but also in the household, in 
the state, and in the world ? 

Here, then, we have contradictory ideals, — that 
of Jesus, who maintains that his is the common- 
sense method of saving the world, and that of 
Christendom, which maintains that his laws are 
impracticable. 

What then .? Shall our civilisation crumble at 
the word of Christ .? or shall Christ be rejected .? 
That his way of life would mean the breaking 
down of commerce, the dismemberment of empires, 
the crumbling of law and order, is perhaps the 
reasonable forecast concerning an untried method; 



12 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i 

but its truth has yet to be proved. We have 
no experience that goes to suggest it. No con- 
siderable body of men have for any considerable 
length of time attempted in the power of faith 
to heal the sick, to restore self-control to the 
hysteric, to turn the other cheek, to forgive the 
criminal, to give the cloke after the coat, to 
agree with an adversary at all cost in order to 
avoid the tribunal of war. No large number of 
Christian preachers have ever urged that social 
and national life should be conducted in the spirit 
of these injunctions. We face the teaching of 
Jesus, as we stand at the end of the second 
Christian millennium, an untried path leading 
to an unknown region of human life. Now, 
when the heart of Africa, the temples of Thibet, 
the frozen seas, are yielding their last secrets 
to us, and we are liable to feel that the world 
has no more mysteries except in those ultimate 
assumptions of knowledge on which the struc- 
tures of science rest, we have not even grasped 
the idea that the world's greatest genius, in 
coming to save the world, pointed to a plan for 
human life on this earth which, if Christianity 
be of God, must mould the enterprise of the 
future, and prove the path of discoveries more 
exhilarating and of greater worth than any yet 
unfolded to our eager eyes. Ever and anon in 
the Christian centuries we witness a glimpse of 
his ideal, illuminating the minds of certain men 
and women, produce some great movement for- 
ward, but it has always been quickly reabsorbed 
by the common lower ideal when the saint whose 



CH. I OUR NEED OF REFORMATION 13 

inspiration lifted men for the hour had passed 
away. Yet the plan of Jesus still lies before 
the world, clearly expressed in human language, 
clearly exemplified in his own ministry, and, as 
he believed, made practical by the marvels of 
corporate faith which he inaugurated as God's 
will for man and the proper outfit of human 
capacity. 

Even if the precepts of Jesus only mark out 
the path to the whole truth he came to impart, we 
must at the same time remember that they mark 
out the only path to that truth. It is also certain 
that we have not accepted that path. It is not a 
plain path; and when we hesitate to start under 
clouds that bar our vision of the end, our difficulty 
is real. The ablest theorists do not help us; and 
our sin as Christians has lain in our conviction 
that what is, reasonably speaking, impossible to 
man is also impossible to God. Yet we know 
that the deepest problems of life must be worked 
out in action — not only individual but corporate 
action; philosophy or theology is but a reasonable 
account "after the event." We also know that 
the greatest contributions to the working principles 
of the race before they justified themselves in 
practice were only stumbling-blocks to the theo- 
logian and foolishness to the philosopher. Such 
was monotheism when all the world was poly- 
theistic; such was monogamy when all the world 
practised polygamy; such was the education of 
the serf; such was the freedom of the slave; 
such, above all, was trust in the Cross. And to- 
day, when we cannot see how the highest degree 



14 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i 

of self-realisation, personal or national, can be 
reached by corporate obedience to the methods of 
Jesus, our sin does not lie in our inability to see 
the path, but in our determination to say we see, 
and to walk by sight. 



CHAPTER II 



THE VITAL AGE 



We know how joyful, how rapid, was the spread 
of the influence of Jesus Christ in the first hundred 
years after his death. In the teeth of cruel per- 
secution, in spite of slow travel and slow transcrip- 
tion, what Jesus called "the good news" lifted 
the crippled civilisation of the Latin world, and 
sent it forward leaping and walking and praising 
God. There have been many explanations of that 
first sudden growth and expansion of Christianity 
and of its subsequent checks and periods of stagna- 
tion. All these explanations have probably some 
truth. It only concerns us here to observe that, 
as regards the authority on which our faith rests, 
we have much in common with the Christians of 
that most vital period. Because the problems of 
scholars have to-day escaped from the schools and 
gone abroad, the authority of our sacred writings 
has become very much what that of the oral and 
written report was in that most ardent time. We, 
like the early heathen inquirers, find a tradition of 
the sayings and actions of "the Lord" which we 
would fain believe to be historical. If historical, 

15 



1 6 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i 

we know that its accuracy may be impugned, and 
we must be as careful to compare one account 
with another as to probe each as far as may be to 
the source. No other rehgious writings have 
equal significance for us. We must pierce through 
everything to the character and power of the 
actual "Lord" they present. Because it is by 
that character and power that we must test the 
truth of the record, we are not to be stopped in 
our longing look by the supposed sacredness of 
any letter or by the interpretation of any school — 
the one may be inaccurate, the other effete. Above 
all, we will not be impeded by any doctrines about 
God which Jesus himself does not teach, for, like 
the early heathen converts, we know not apart 
from him what God to believe in. Now, as at 
first, if we would seek any help stronger than self- 
help, if we feel any need for salvation, material or 
spiritual, we must, for dear life's sake, seek to find 
in the person of Jesus Christ a living and reliable 
power, who can do for us something which we 
cannot do for ourselves. 

We turn to the Gospels and find that their 
main theme is a "kingdom," both present and 
eternal, to which Jesus calls all men, of which he 
is the king. This implies that he still lives in an 
invisible world of spirit, very near, still calls to us 
to enter and enjoy the kingdom, to proclaim its 
power and suffer for its sake. It is not enough 
for us now that the Church or the Book repeats 
the call. The edifice of the visible Church, ages 
old, marvellous and majestic, seemed to cant over 
some while ago, some part of the foundation 



CHAP. II THE VITAL AGE 17 

sinking below the ground, the door hanging loose. 
A better rock bottom may be touched; towers 
and walls may be righted, the door set firm, we 
hope, but in the meantime may not be sure. 
Many have trooped in without right of entrance, 
and have lived under the protection of the veil 
that hangs before the inner presence-chamber 
exquisitely wrought of holy scripture. But now 
this veil has been rent in the midst by learning 
which we cannot impugn. The glory of the 
workmanship may be enhanced by the rending of 
the poorer part, but we cannot now join the pieces 
perfectly. We who would not trifle with life 
have no choice but to run breathless into the 
Holy Place, each asking, "Who art thou. Lord .?" 
and "What wouldst thou have me to do.f*" 
The two questions are one, for personality is 
revealed in the demand it makes upon other 
persons. 

This condition of things is full of hope. If, 
in the unsettlement of the hour, we are no worse 
off than the early Christians, we may hope to be 
what they were. If Jesus Christ was not his 
own revelation, then the sacred canon of the 
Book or Holy Church could never have come 
rightly into being, built up as they were by men 
who had no guide but his Spirit. If Jesus Christ 
is his own revelation, now, as in the first Christian 
ages before the first canon of Scripture was formed 
or the voice of the Church unified, each man may 
weigh all reports concerning him, find that personal 
revelation for himself, and follow only in obedience 
to the heavenly vision. Now we may see faith 



i8 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i 

in the Christ again glow and spread like living, 
leaping flame. Church and Scripture, in so far as 
they represent him, will be reinstated. 

There is, indeed, already much evidence of this 
purging and rapid fire of the living Christ in the 
field of foreign missions. To one class of Christian 
missionaries we would here draw particular atten- 
tion, because they are in the condition of the 
primitive Christians. They have existed in all 
ages, but they are now very numerous, and give 
abundant testimony. We refer to certain native 
Christian teachers in heathen countries, who go 
forward with the practice of the presence of Jesus 
Christ as their only learning, their only means of 
support, and their only reward.^ These men brave 
the worst persecution, they teach their converts to 
brave it, thinking it well worth while for the 
benefit that is theirs. Some heal the sick, cast 
out devils, and buy their daily bread with coins 
minted in the bank of faith. If they are deluded 
it is our duty to go and raise them above their 
superstitions; if, on the other hand, they have 
found a saner and more abundant life than we 
experience, they have discovered its vital germs in 
the small, uncommentaried translations of the 
Gospels which they carry, on which they feed, a 
source to which we have access, which may produce 
as much for us if we come with a like simplicity. 

^ See The Holy Spirit in Missions, by Dr. A. J. Gordon, 
chap, iv.; Story of the L.M.S., by C. S. Home, especially end 
of chap. viii. ; the biography o^ Pastor Hsi, of the China Inland 
Mission; also missionary reports of the "Christian Alliance for 
Divine Healing and Foreign Missions," New York. 



CHAP. II THE VITAL AGE 19 

Is simplicity here a cant phrase ? We should 
do well to be rid of all such; but it is worth while 
to observe that the attitude of mind to which alone 
the truth of any department of life yields itself is 
exactly the same in the disciplined intellect of the 
greatest scholar and in the honest, earnest child or 
ignorant learner. It is at once the earliest gift of 
nature to the normal mind in its unfolding and 
the highest result of the mental discipline of the 
schools. We discount the evidence and theories 
of a scientist or critic when we say, *'He has a 
theory to prove," "He can't get rid of a pre- 
supposition," "He sees what he wants to see." 
Such comments are a slur on scholarship in any 
department of .learning, and by them we mean to 
suggest just what is meant by the words, "Except 
ye become as little children ye shall not enter." 
It is not ignorance, or the subordination of the 
reason, that is required for faith. It is the highest 
exercise of reason to seek truth with that reverence 
which makes no forecast of the finding. It is the 
result of the widest knowledge to believe that 
unknown truth is, and is the rewarder of them 
that seek it. This is the temper of all true faith. 



CHAPTER III 

THE ACTIONS OF JESUS 

To know what that understanding of God was 
that Jesus called "the faith that removes moun- 
tains," and to be able to exercise it, would be to re- 
cover the early joy of the gospel. No one can read 
the Gospels and the Acts with candid, unbiassed 
mind and not perceive the exuberance of delight, in 
spite of "much tribulation," which the doctrine, 
called, par excellence, "the good news," produced in 
those who received it. Our great trouble is that it is 
almost impossible to read what is hackneyed without 
reading into it whatever hackneyed gloss we chance 
to be accustomed to. The individual may or may 
not have the right of using his private judgment 
in reading the Gospels, but it is certain that only 
one man in a multitude has the power to use it. 
The particular joy of those Gospels, and the faith 
that produced it, have been almost blotted out by 
the effort to read into the earthly life of Jesus the 
most depressing convictions of the later Judaic 
prophets and of the writers of the Epistles who still 
joyfully followed their Master, and, with arbitrary 
eclecticism, to relegate their promises of joy to 

20 



CHAP. Ill THE ACTIONS OF JESUS 21 

a future state. The walling psalms of Israel in 
subjection to foreign powers, and the litanies of 
the Christian Church in the Dark Ages, sing in 
our ears whenever we listen to the good news of 
Jesus. We look at his whole life as through church 
windows stained with carnal crucifixions, and are 
almost unconscious that the glass colours all that 
we see. 

All that Jesus said and did is an expression of 
his insight into the character of God and into 
God's attitude to men; and what he did must 
have deeper significance than what he merely said. 
Language is only coin minted in the heart of a 
race; it can only express ideas that men have 
already consciously thought in developing their 
laws, their civilisations, the dicta of their schools. 
If Jesus Christ was indeed a revelation of God, 
his ministry, not his words, must be the chief part 
of that revelation. As well say that God could 
instruct the hosts of living creatures how to live 
by the handbooks of the sciences, or form the 
instincts of friendship in man by the laws of hu- 
man governments, or reward spiritual attainments 
by the coin of earthly treasuries, as say that the 
words Jesus used contain the whole gospel. If 
*'for this world the word of God is Christ," the 
words Christ used could be but part of his message. 
Although by obedience to his plain words we 
must be judged, it is by his actions that he asked 
to be justified or condemned. Instead of fixing 
our attention first on those actions which the con- 
sensus of the records certainly attribute to him, 
the Church is wont to turn our attention from 



22 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i 

them to give final teaching on certain aspects of 
his pre-natal life and his resurrection to which it 
is less certain that he gave the seal of his own 
authority. The message of angels, the virgin 
birth, the sacrificial suffering, the ascent into a 
cloud in the sky — to deny the possibility of these 
is to assume that we have conned the possibilities 
of the universe, but who can say that Jesus asked 
to be judged by these ? Yet it is from these alone 
that we often try to make out the lineaments of 
the Eternal Father. Even if we come back to 
hold these as undoubted facts relating to his 
departure from the Eternal and Invisible and his 
return thither, he certainly did not set them forth 
as our first and chief lesson. If in his ways of 
restoring men mind and body he has told us earthly 
things and we believe not, how can we expect to 
understand the more mysterious matters of the 
hidden heaven which may have been seen in the 
trailing glory of his advent and return .? 

The truth that the early Church held to be most 
important, the truth that in fact is most important 
to every Christian who sets forth to battle in the 
name of Jesus with the awful reality of sin and 
pain, is the personal presence of Jesus. St. Paul, 
giving a plain account of his own first trial, says, 
"The Lord stood with me." It is this very 
common experience which is the stronghold of the 
Christian faith. It was certainly by his works of 
might and love that Jesus impressed the power of 
his person, the sense of his presence, upon the 
Church, for he says very little about its importance; 
even in the Johannine discourses it is more often 



CHAP. Ill THE ACTIONS OF JESUS 23 

the indwelling of the Spirit that is emphasised. 
From his words in the Synoptic Gospels it would 
be difficult to prove that his continued grace to 
the Church was to be more than the impress of his 
name, i.e., his character. But the preponderance 
of action over speech in that record makes his 
personal power the one great reality of his 
ministry; and the ways in which he evinced it 
make it the one great necessity to the children of 
his kingdom. The last words of St. Matthew's 
Gospel had become, long before they were written, 
the first law, as it were, of Christian thought. 

Among the sayings of our Lord which appear 
to have been committed to writing at a very early 
date there are two which must form a most im- 
portant clue to the understanding of his character 
and ministry, because they give an estimate of it 
in his own words. One is the passage in which 
Jesus, with overcharged heart, upbraids the 
favoured cities of Galilee;^ the other is his own 
epitome of his ministry sent in answer to the 
Baptist's doubt.^ 

It was a moment of deep emotion that pro- 
duced the reproachful apostrophe to Bethsaida 
and Capernaum. In such a mood the deepest 
convictions of the heart are shown. Jesus tells 
us that his aim is to bring men to repentance, 
and that his method is the performance of those 
works of mercy whose character we know from 
the adjoining records. He does not say, "If the 
word that has been preached to you had been 

^ St. Matt. xi. 21-24, and St. Luke x. 13-15. 
^ St. Matt. xi. 2-6, and St. Luke vii. 19-23. 



24 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i 

preached in Tyre and Sidon," etc., but here 
distinctly claims to be judged by his works. 
Here it is evident that he feels that his merciful 
works speak louder than his words, and that the 
ultimate sin was the hardness of heart which 
rejected the proofs of such bountiful compassion 
and power. From this passage it would appear 
that when he said to John's disciples, "The blind 
see, the lame walk," etc., he referred to physical, 
not, as the modern mind is apt to suppose, to 
spiritual, works of healing. For it is obvious that, 
if the cures he is able to point out to the disciples 
of the Baptist had been spiritual reformations, he 
could never, either before or after, have condemned 
the same neighbourhood for lack of faith; he 
could not have asserted, "The spiritually blind 
see, the spiritually lame walk," and at another 
time have complained that this was not the case, 
nor would he have expected a careless majority to 
be roused and convinced by the inward grace he 
had implanted in the hearts of a few. 

This answer to the Baptist is thus of the utmost 
significance as containing Jesus' own estimate 
of his mission. It is distinctly said that the 
cause of the Baptist's doubt and inquiry was the 
report of the works that Jesus did. We may 
assume that their physical nature was his difficulty, 
for John's mind was fixed upon a purely ethical 
result. The tradition concerning him shows that 
John had rejected the common belief in a merely 
material salvation. National salvation consisted 
for him in national and individual goodness of a 
high order. John apparently supposed that such 



CHAP. Ill THE ACTIONS OF JESUS 25 

goodness was in the immediate power of the people 
if they only would. He thought that all men 
who were worth anything would prove themselves 
by self-government to be good fruit-trees in God's 
garden and pure grain on God's threshing-floor; 
if not, they must be hewn down and burned. This 
is the story concerning John, and it is true to the 
type. The moralist is usually a man of well- 
developed and well-balanced mental power. He 
does not cry, as even St. Paul did, "O, wretched 
that I am, who shall deliver me from the body 
of this death"; and although the moralist of that 
time was certainly inclined to believe the body to 
be the seat of sin, and was therefore more or less 
ascetic, he felt himself strong enough to control such 
unruly desires as warred against his righteous will. 
The true moralist also has humility in the presence 
of what appears to him a greater purity than his 
own. Such men usually recognise that harshness 
is their besetting sin, although they do not see 
how to avoid it without lowering the standard. It 
is probable that John perceived that the lamb-like 
gentleness of Jesus was a divine quality as long as 
he could see that it was strictly subservient to the 
severest ethical standards. But a reformer like 
John, if he thinks earnestly at all about the 
material welfare of the people, regards it as a 
consequence of righteous living, something that 
would come after reformation if at all. The fact 
that it was the report of Jesus' healing works that 
caused lohn to inauire whether he reallv was the 

•-'1 ^ 

Christ, suggests that this whole business of spending 
time and strength in easing all who asked of their 



26 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i 

disabilities and pains appeared to John to be moral 
trifling. To remove afflictions which he held to 
be God's discipline/ and that without putting the 
recipients of relief to any probation of righteous- 
ness, could hardly have appeared to a mind like 
his to be true kindness, certainly not the most 
direct way of evoking repentance and its fruits. 

If, then, Jesus could have given an answer 
suited to John's desire and mental temperament, 
he surely would have done so. Which of us 
would not pity a great reformer whose light was 
darkened by dungeon walls and daily danger of 
a cruel death, and whose lion-like spirit yet 
reached out to desire the salvation of his nation 
more than his own welfare ? If this situation 
could touch our hearts, how much more the 
tender heart of his contemporary, Jesus ! What 
is the epitome of his ministry which Jesus gives to 
this moralist .? Does he minimise his work for 
men's bodies by showing that his cures were 
the incidental overflow of compassion in cases 
of extreme misery .? Does he say that to teach 
righteousness is his main work, and the other 
subsidiary .? No. He bids the messengers see 
for themselves that the first result of his work 
is that sick men have restored to them the use 
of their bodily powers, and that the unfortunate 
are comforted by good news of God. Jesus does 
not even mention in his reply the casting out of 
demons; which was, of all his benevolent acts, 

^ One of the most characteristic notes of the more spiritual 
literature of later Judaism was the interpretation of suffering as 
a sign, not of God's hostility, but of his educative care. 



CHAP. Ill THE ACTIONS OF JESUS 27 

the one which would most have appealed to John 
as having a possible ethical significance. 

Since Jesus, in these two passages, claims to 
have his ministry and character judged by his 
wonderful works, it is of first importance that we 
should discover what he considered their essential 
characteristic. It has often been assumed that 
this was their miraculous nature; but let us 
inquire. In another case^ Jesus is asked by 
religious men to perform a work of which the 
essential feature shall be that it is miraculous and 
beyond the power of common men. There is no 
evidence that it was frivolity in those who asked 
that made Jesus refuse their request. While it 
is true that no marvel can prove the power of 
God, because there are always two other possible 
explanations, fraud or the devil, men often honestly 
think, even in this day, that they would be con- 
vinced of divine power if they saw a "miraculous 
sign." Jesus calls his questioners hypocrites; 
but we cannot think that if he had believed them 
conscious of their hypocrisy, he would have taken 
the trouble to tell them the underlying character 
of the party spirit they displayed. The very 
passion of his denunciation proves that he saw 
they gave themselves credit for good intention; 
and a Church which during long periods has 
lauded the works of Jesus merely as signs of 
supernatural power cannot condemn their demand. 
It could not have been because of their personal 
depravity that Jesus treated this request of the 
scribes and Pharisees with contempt, because we 

^ St. Matt, xii. 38, xvi. i; St. Mark viii. ii. 



28 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i 

are told he rejected the desire of a mixed 
multitude for the same aid to faith with the 
same reproach.^ We should surely be justified 
in learning from these incidents alone that it was 
not any miraculous character of his works by 
which Jesus asked to be judged, but by their 
other qualities of personal power and unsparing 
love. 

There are other passages, belonging, according 
to many critics, to the same original substratum 
of the Christian evangel, which show that the 
miraculous element was not in the mind of Jesus 
a feature of his works and signs. In the com- 
missions to the Twelve and the Seventy the 
command to heal disease and to cast out devils 
goes to prove that in respect to such powers 
Jesus did not think of himself as unique. Of 
like tenor is the passage in which he freely 
concedes to the sons of the Jews a like power. ^ 
But much stronger evidence on the point is the 
fact that he required a certain psychical condition 
in which to work — faith, individual and corporate. 
This prevents us laying emphasis on the miraculous 
nature of the work if we accept as the scientific 
test of a miracle that laid down by J. S. Mill — ■ 
"Were there present in the case such external 
conditions, such second causes, as we may call 
them, that whenever these conditions and causes 
reappear the event will be reproduced ? If there 
were, it is not a miracle; if there were not, it 
is." Jesus certainly taught that whenever the 

* St. Luke xi. 29. 

^ St. Matt. xii. 27; St. Luke xi. 19. 



CHAP. Ill THE ACTIONS OF JESUS 29 

right faith was exercised the same marvels would 
result. 

Although critics differ as to the antiquity and 
authenticity of some of the passages quoted in 
this chapter it remains true that we have no 
history of Jesus, even the earliest and most scanty, 
that does not make his wonderful works an 
essential part of the gospel. The most ample 
tradition we have of him does not lay more 
proportionate stress upon his benevolent marvels 
than does the most meagre. If we would under- 
stand the ministry of Jesus as he understood it 
we must not minimise the importance of his 
works, but study their significance, which does not 
depend on the assumption that they are miraculous. 

As the messenger of God Jesus went about 
showing how God's will is to be done on earth 
as in heaven. All hopes of heaven include these — 
forgiveness, love, joy, self-control, and health; 
Jesus spent himself showing how ready God was 
to bestow these in response to faith. This great 
revelation — that all wrath and misery were hostile 
to God's will — was necessary to knit man's heart 
to God; it was the outfit required for a new 
start in God's service. It was, indeed, the defini- 
tion of service, for it had for its negative side 
the doctrine that all the penalties of sin — all 
hatred, oppression, want, infirmity, and disease — 
proceeded from a source of volitional evil at 
enmity with God, and were to be vanquished and 
cast out by the victory of faith. 



CHAPTER IV 

FAITH 

Faith is the human equipment needed for hfe 
in the kingdom which Jesus inaugurated. What 
is faith ? 

The simplest activities of the human heart 
cannot be known except by experience. How is 
it possible to teach the mind what love is v/hen the 
heart is self-centred, or explain hatred to a happy 
child .? But as far as the character of faith can be 
put into words, most of us would agree in saying 
that faith largely consists in a true estimate of 
those qualities of personality which, of their very 
nature, are hidden from sense, and the exercise of 
faith is any activity based on this estimate. Super- 
stition, we may add, must involve a false estimate 
of those same personal qualities. (In making such 
"true estimate" it must not be forgotten that not 
only intelligence but emotion and volition are 
involved.) 

Can we briefly consider this without being trite 
on a well-worn subject ^ Take an elementary 
instance. A savage disabled in a solitary place 
might put faith in his dog, sending him to fetch 

30 



CHAP. IV 



FAITH 31 



aid. If, however, the dog had been trained into 
a mechanical habit of bringing aid, the rehance 
placed in him by his master would not be faith, 
but the sort of confidence we have in the properties 
of inanimate things and mechanical laws. He 
could only have faith in the dog's spontaneous 
action in so far as it had evinced personal qualities, 
and in so far as he could detect sagacity and good 
will from its general conduct. Hope would rise 
to faith if the dog had displayed these qualities 
in a high degree, and more especially if the man 
belonged to a tribe where all were in the habit 
of trusting to the sagacity and affection of dogs 
in emergencies. 

Faith in the dog would involve observation, 
memory, and an inference of reason from what the 
man knew of this and other dogs. In the last 
analysis his faith, true or false, would be his 
estimate of such personal character as the dog 
possessed. His exercise of faith would be activity 
based on this estimate; and it would involve in 
the man courage and purpose, for despondency 
and lack of purpose produce a mental inactivity 
which would eat into the truest faith. 

In this simple case we see how the man who 
could best gauge the qualities of his dog would 
himself have those qualities which make men fittest 
to survive, and that the faith that would sustain 
such a man in such a period of waiting would be 
most perfectly exercised when he had the best use 
of all his mental powers. 

In this case, however, the advantage of faith 
would be purely subjective. It would hinder the 



32 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book: 

sufFerlng man from sinking under despair, but 
could have no effect upon the fidehty of the dog. 
Imagine a fellow-man in the place of the dog. Faith 
on the part of the sufferer would not be changed 
in quality, although it might be in degree, but that 
faith would have effect upon the messenger. If he 
were good-hearted, the fact that his injured fellow 
had faith in him would add a strong motive to 
natural compassion. Such trust, however, could 
not evoke in him qualities which were not there, 
nor alter physical circumstance. What effect then, 
other than subjective, would the exercise of faith 
have .? It would, for the hour, knit the purpose 
and desire of the two men into one. The more 
unquestioning the faith of the injured, the more 
responsive the messenger, the more absolute would 
be their oneness — the courage, the purpose, the 
hope and heart of the two acting as one against all 
opposing forces, mental and physical. Here we 
come on the first trace of the law governing 
corporate life. This more than single strength of 
a man at one with another is no fantastic notion, 
but a commonplace of daily life. Which of us, as 
a child, has not been toppling on some forbidden 
height, unbalanced, about to fall, and been made 
perfectly secure again by a cheerful word or the 
mere touch of a kindly finger-tip ? Which of us 
has not seen a futile man made effectual in pro- 
fessional and public life by obtaining a good wife, 
who yet never appears with him in the street, the 
exchange, or assembly ? Which of us has not been 
ready to give up an enterprise in which the odds 
were against us, and been heartened to go on by 



CHAP, rv 



FAITH 33 



realising that we had the backing of one other 
human will ? 

Let us here note that in thinking men this 
oneness produced by faith must for the special 
purpose extend to opinion. To return to our 
illustration, it is evident that the sufferer must be 
convinced, not only as to the ability and fidelity 
of his friend, but as to his thoughts and theories 
on the matter. The messenger might conceivably 
believe lonely pain to be a moral benefit. In such 
a case the sufferer could not have the same con- 
fidence; resignation would take the place of hope. 
Or suppose that the sufferer knew that his friend 
would regard the succour as wholly desirable, but 
would regard his case as of small proportionate 
importance compared with other manifold claims 
upon his attention and energy. Again he could 
not feel the same confidence as if he knew that the 
claim of his sad position would absorb his friend's 
attention till succour was obtained. 

The occasion of faith which we have been con- 
sidering is the simplest, and must necessarily lie at 
the beginning of all our education in faith. To 
lie in bodily helplessness and rely upon the aid of 
love is the primary attitude of mind in the most 
formative years of childhood. In further con- 
sidering the nature of faith we must have regard to 
the more complex occasions of faith between man 
and man, and to the growth and culmination of 
the life of faith between men — friendship. There 
is, of course, in any human friendship much of that 
reliance which is born of knowledge. We trust a 
friend, in a multitude of instances, just as we trust 



34 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i 

a stout stick or a strong rope, a ferry-man or a cab- 
driver, knowing enough of the properties of each 
to know that they will be all that we require in 
certain circumstances. Over and above the pro- 
perties of which we have knowledge there are 
qualities in every man concerning which 

We have but faith; we cannot know; 
For knowledge is of things we see. 

It is only that element in personality which appears 
to act spontaneously in which we can have faith, 
that element in whose actions we descry an inner 
unity upon diverse occasions where outward unity 
is impossible. In the story of Gethsemane, when 
Jesus says to the sleeping three, "The spirit is 
willing, but the flesh is weak,'' he evinces faith in 
hidden elements of character, hidden in the past 
under selfish rivalries and claims for reward, and 
now under the desertion and denial he had him- 
self prophesied as at hand. Yet by action based 
on such estimate of his followers, he, humanly 
speaking, conquered the civilised world. Or, to 
take a widely different case, Leonidas and his 
three hundred would have been as grass before the 
wind had it not been for mutual faith. Every 
Thermopylae the world has seen has been possible 
because men did at times trust men to stand against 
all the manifold claims of individual self-interest. 
The best incidents in a life like that of the patriot 
Hampden are the outcome of faith in the untried 
capacity of his neighbours to rise to new responsi- 
bilities. All measures of self-government by which 
the race has advanced have been the result of man's 



CHAP. IV 



FAITH 35 



faith In man to become something more than he 
has been. The best relations of Hfe, on which the 
fabric of our progress rests, are built of this faith. 
It is that that makes the difference between the 
Western home and the Eastern harem. 

Further, we can easily perceive, in any friend- 
ship that through a lifetime depends daily upon 
another's good will unbiassed by selfish interests, 
that as each year passes, and every energy is called 
into play by communion, and each acquires a closer 
understanding of the other, this life of faith, faith 
of each in the other, while engaging all the faculties 
men have, will at last be what it was at first, an 
estimate — an estimate truer and often higher, but 
of the same kind. And while such a friendship 
commonly begins with prayer — need, request, 
service, that only at first — at last it will not have 
grown beyond the occasions of need and service, 
even although it also means much more of mutual 
communion beside. The elementary exercises of 
faith — petition and response — will ever be more 
frequent, more unconscious, more perfect, when 
the friendship has permeated larger areas of the 
mutual life. The estimate of another which is the 
product of a lifetime of mutual understanding 
will be more accurate; its superstitions will have 
dropped off, its truth be established. It will also 
be different in scope, and its assurance will have 
permeated the whole nature, conscious and un- 
conscious; but it will remain an estimate of the 
unseen personal qualities of the friend. 

It will, perhaps, be said that faith is not so 
much an estimate of personal character as a high 



36 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i 

estimate. But reflection shows that it requires 
onh^ to be a true estimate. If a character is 
variable and unstable, an estimate that regards him 
as reliable is superstitious. To believe in his 
instability, if indeed he be unstable, is the only 
basis of right dealing with such a person. If, 
however, there be a degree of stability under the 
instability, that also must be reckoned with in the 
estimate. Or let us take the case of a character 
wholly bad. An accurate estimate of his wicked- 
ness is the faith required for dealing with him; 
to question the w^ickedness, to act upon a hope 
or supposition of something else, would be a false 
faith. For example, when Jesus said that "Satan" 
could not do good, he taught a faith in the uniform 
nature of evil as well as of good. Had the Church 
ceased to attribute physical goods to "the devil" 
she would have gained much. 

But, again, it will be said that we do speak of 
faith as being great or little in quantity, whereas 
we cannot quantify the mental vision we call an 
estimate. But we can have vigour or feebleness 
in any mental process, and in all the activities based 
on that process. It is possible for a man to have 
an estimate of another which is not false and yet 
is shadowy compared with his estimate of himself 
or of forces on which he must rely. And indeed 
there are men who live through all the relations of 
life and never realise personality sufficiently to deal 
with persons in any other way than as they deal 
with variable natural forces — such as wind and 
weather, which a man may utilise but cannot count 
upon. Such a man cannot be said to have a 



CHAP. IV 



FAITH 37 



superstitious estimate of the character of his fellows. 
What he lacks is vigour of thought as applied 
to character, vigour of observation in mustering 
given data, vigour of desire for more than is seen, 
vigour of that fine co-operation of all his powers 
which fetches from the unseen something just 
beyond the logical inference from given data. He 
is a man not of false faith but of little faith. His 
whole nature could be employed in forming a 
greater faith, a more vigorous estimate, on which 
he could not but act. 

To take an example from our New Testament: 
when Jesus said, "I have not seen so great faith, 
no, not in Israel" he was speaking to a man who 
had evidently exercised vigorous thought concern- 
ing the power by which Jesus cured disease. He 
argued that the power Jesus exercised over the 
health and disease of those brought into his pres- 
ence was not a physical but a spiritual power, and 
therefore, he concluded, presence or absence could 
make no difference. "Speak the word only and 
my servant (who lies at a distance) shall be healed." 

When Jesus repeatedly used his reproachful 
formula, "Oh ye of little faith," he seems usually 
to have been chiding, not so much a wrong 
estimate of his own character or of the Father's, as 
vagueness and inactivity of thought which allows 
the attention to be diverted from the object of 
faith to the causes of fear. It is clear, for example, 
that in the story of Peter's walking on the water, 
the disciple could not have altered his estimate of 
our Lord's power because the waves were boisterous. 
That estimate must have been one that inspired 



38 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i 

absolute trust, or he would never have got out of 
his ship. What happened was that the grasp of 
his mind and will upon what he knew to be the 
life-force of Jesus relaxed when he gave his atten- 
tion to danger; the power that union of will and 
thought with Jesus gave was lost because such 
corporate union must be mutual. 

There is one very important fact to be observed 
concerning the quality of faith that a man exercises 
in his fellow-creatures ; it is not determined merely 
by his individual qualities; it rises or falls with the 
standards of the community in which he lives. 
Here, again, we learn a law of the corporate life. 
For example, in a land where men habitually shut 
up their women, it would be difficult, almost 
impossible, for one man to set his women at large 
and never feel the slightest suspicion concerning 
their affections or behaviour, however trustworthy 
they might be. Suspicious thoughts would intrude 
at times, no matter how high he might at other 
times rise above them, and we all admit that he 
would be, not an average, but a remarkable man 
to rise above them at all. Or again, in a com- 
munity where men habitually doubted the honesty 
of their fellows, a man who should place confidence 
in a friend beyond the limit of mutual self-interest 
would naturally be beset by inward suspicions. 
To hold to such a course in defiance of suspicion 
would perhaps be the highest degree of friendship 
to which he could attain. 

It is very natural that in matters of faith a 
man should thus be greatly dependent on his 
environment, for he is very dependent on it for 



CHAP. IV 



FAITH 39 



the degree in which he reaHses matters of fact 
— fact either of sensuous experience or logical 
inference. Fashions in taste and philosophy 
change the face of the natural universe for man. 
One generation does not see, much less notice, the 
beauties of nature; in another generation, of the 
same nation in the same climate, we find aesthetic 
joy in nature common, even children and the un- 
educated observing the earth's beauty. In the 
ancient Roman world the only landscape that was 
admirable was the flat and fertile plain, where 
transit was easy and cultivation remunerative. 
The mountains stood for hardship and peril, and 
were merely ugly in their cruelty. Again, in each 
generation we find men actually aware only of such 
facts of life as fit into the philosophy of their age. 
Eclecticism in observation and inference is one of 
the most salient characteristics of the Zeitgeist. 
Hence arises the difficulty of the historian who, 
when he would depict a bygone age, finds that no 
record of the time is impartial, either in the facts it 
records or the inferences it makes. Nor can he be 
sure of arriving at the whole truth by balancing 
one chronicler against another, because the cor- 
porate thought and corporate prejudices of the age 
colour every source of information, and must, so 
far as they can be ascertained, be allowed for. 

Now if this be the case in the attempt to 
observe plain matters of fact, how much more 
must it be the case when man seeks to exercise 
powers additional to those of sense and logic, 
reaching out to the unseen self within his fellow- 
man. Faith, like abstract reasoning, is a more 



40 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i 

recently developed power than the senses we have 
in common with low forms of life and the sagacity 
we share with intelligent brutes; for that reason 
we are more uncertain in its exercise and more 
dependent on the corporate atmosphere within 
which we exercise it. 

Another notable characteristic of faith is that 
even when a man bases his ordinary actions upon 
it he can seldom reckon up his own faith. We 
are all conscious at times of being surprised, in 
some sudden moment of insight, by finding that 
we trust some individual more or less than we 
supposed. In some crucial moment a man dis- 
covers how little he has known his own mind with 
regard to the comparative worth of neighbours or 
friends. Most of us are sincerely under the im- 
pression that we would trust all whom we have 
admitted to the inner circle of friendship against 
all appearances; but we are forced to admit that 
in cases where serious accusation is made, and 
supported by evidence to others convincing, he is 
a rare man v/ho does not know the agony of doubt. 
When no such crucial hour of self-revelation occurs 
in a man's life there is a fair presumption that he 
may be, from first to last, unconscious of the 
precise quality of the estimate he really makes of 
his fellow-man. 

Man's faith in God cannot be different in kind 
from his faith in man. Since it is only personal 
attributes that can evoke faith, faith in God is only 
possible when man regards God's character as in 
some sense "in the image" of his own. It follows 
that in so far as man conceives God as force, or 



CHAP. IV 



FAITH 41 



substance, or anything other than personal, the 
rehance he can place in him will be inferior to that 
he places in a person; it will be the reliance he 
places in law or in the properties of matter. We 
are all aware that this sort of reliance is the peril 
of any religious system that has the appearance 
of mechanical working, as, for example, a system 
involving the uniform inspiration of a literature, or 
the uniform working of certain rites and privileges. 
Although reliance in a salvation thus partly 
mechanical certainly does not exclude the highest 
faith, yet, as we all know, it is fatally easy to trust 
to such an artificial religious theory as must be 
composed by finding a favourite doctrine in every 
book of the Bible, or to trust to the efficacy of 
sacraments to ensure future salvation just as one 
would trust a cab or a ferry-boat to land one at 
the right destination. 

But to return, our point is that man's faith in a 
personal God is identical with the estimate he 
forms of God's character by reaching beyond what 
he can learn of God in creation. But the estimate 
of faith is not independent of what we learn of 
God in creation. On the contrary, just as the 
simplest exercise of faith toward a fellow-man is 
based on all the data we have concerning his 
thoughts, his emotions, and his will, so faith in God 
must be based on all the data we have concerning 
him in the universe, which is his visible action. 
Even in a child, faith in God must be in part derived 
from the notion he forms of the universe, includ- 
ing of course the persons about him. 

That estimate of God embodied in our faith is. 



42 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i 

then, in part an inference of reason from what we 
know of nature, especially human nature, and of 
all the facts that bear on the religious life. But it 
is, even at the outset, more than that, just as a 
man's faith in the fidelity of a dog, or the love of 
a life-long friend, is more than anything that can 
be wrested by logical process from given data. 
Man's faith in God not only involves his notion 
of the whole of nature, but is the outcome of his 
whole nature. For if all that he is and does goes 
to make up and to modify his estimate of the 
hidden personality in his brother, it must also 
make and modify his estimate of the hidden 
personality of supreme Love. It can never be 
merely the exercise of an extra power. It is an 
outcome of the whole man ; it is the highest out- 
come, requiring practice in mundane faith before 
it can attain to God. The well-known axiom of 
the Johannine epistle holds good — if a man does 
not put faith in his brother whom he has seen, he 
cannot, in any real, practical way, put faith in God 
whom he has not seen. 

All that we have been saying is that faith is the 
view of God taken by the mind's eye, which was 
the figure used by Jesus. We may, with equal 
truth of analogy, speak of the light of a house 
being the window, or the condition in which the 
window is kept, or the light that shines in at the 
window. The light of the mind is the mind's 
eye, or the correctness of the mental vision, or the 
objective reality the mind is able to apprehend. 
"If thine eye be single thy whole body shall be 
full of light." The leper who accosted Jesus 



CHAP. IV 



FAITH 43 



saying, "If thou wilt thou canst make me clean," 
had a true and vigorous estimate of Jesus that was 
only half the truth. Jesus went so far as to touch 
him — unheard of mercy to a leper — in saying, "I 
will."" The touch, the word, made the leper's 
estimate as to power and will complete; with 
his mind's eye he saw one who had both power 
and determination to cure him. The Syro- 
phenician had evidently made a true estimate of 
Jesus before she ignored his dismissal with her 
memorable persistence. The Roman captain had 
a definite belief concerning the authority of Jesus 
in the world of unseen power. In the particular 
in which these were seeking help their whole life 
was full of light because their sight was true. 

To sum up. Faith is the same in kind whether 
exercised toward man or toward God, whether 
exercised for an hour or for a lifetime. Our 
power of faith is largely dependent on our human 
environment. Our actual faith is usually not 
prominent in consciousness, so that a man's notion 
of his own faith is not worth very much. It is 
probably greater or less than he supposes. Its 
test must be its result. An estimate of God's love 
and will for man which knits man's purpose to 
the purpose of God, and knits the purpose of each 
man to that of his fellows, is invincible strength — 
is the supreme victory of mind over chaos — is 
the kingdom of God. 



CHAPTER V 

CORPORATE FAITH 

The kingdom of heaven implies the welding of 
the faith of many into one. To understand what 
condition is needed for the highest corporate faith 
in God we must turn aside and consider the laws 
of all corporate life. 

It will be seen that in this chapter we are 
not attempting to set forth the integrity of the 
individual life — a truth that is in no danger of 
being minimised by the modern temper. We 
believe, indeed, that the only philosophic basis for 
Christianity is the conception of personality as the 
ultimate factor in human thought; the belief that 
a personal intellect can alone interpret nature, as 
a personal intelligence could alone create nature. 
But just as we have no experience of mind except 
under bodily conditions, so we have no experience 
at all of individual mind except as influenced by 
other minds. It is the bearing of this fact on the 
Christian life which we now proceed to consider. 

A race, a nation, a class, an orderly crowd, a 
riotous mob — these are units in the same sense in 
which the individual is a unit. A man's conscious 

44 



cHAP.v CORPORATE FAITH 45 

self is made up of what appears to be many 
selves — wills that conflict, thoughts that argue 
among themselves except when the voice of the 
leader, the stronger volition, wins a whole-hearted 
response. The mind as an individual whole forms 
a different object of study from its separate senti- 
ments and volitions. In like manner a body of 
men related to each other in any way form a unit 
whose faculties are not the same as those of the 
individuals that compose it. The psychology of 
the corporate life is not that of the individual life. 
No one kind-hearted man, for example, could 
rejoice in the death of a stag in the way in which 
a crowd of hunters will rejoice in it. It is well 
known that very bad men in a crowded theatre 
will involuntarily hiss a slight defection from vir- 
tue on the part of a hero. It is not the aggregate 
of their individual sentiments that such men ex- 
press. As an aggregate they have different senti- 
ments from those they possess as individuals. When 
reflecting, they have different powers of thought 
from those they have as individuals; when in action, 
the combined action is not the mere sum of indi- 
vidual actions, but something better or worse. 

Yet although the individual life and the cor- 
porate life may be shown to be different, they 
always merge into and react on one another. This 
chapter is concerned with the effect of the cor- 
porate life on the individual. A man has not the 
same mind when with one neighbour as when with 
another. When with them both his mind undergoes 
another modification. When he lives in a village 
his mind is modified by the pull of the common 



46 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i 

soul of that village. When he goes up to the town 
the larger environment again affects him visibly 
if not consciously. All this has been proved so 
often that it needs repetition here only in order 
to observe that a body of men forming a church 
must come under the same psychological laws as 
govern the same men in other aggregates. 

Further, it is not necessary that men should 
visibly herd together to experience the corporate 
influence. There is abundant evidence that there 
is a force which causes one man to think as his 
neighbour thinks, divided though they be by the 
walls of their separate houses or by miles of inter- 
vening country, without conscious communication, 
and without access to the same visible sources of 
influence, — a force as invisible but as certainly 
operative as gravitation. We know ithat every 
stone lying on a tract of land many miles in extent 
exercises a certain attraction for every other stone. 
We do not dispute this physical law, even though 
we only see the effect of its operation in certain ex- 
aggerated conditions — as, for example, when near 
a high mass of rock, the plumb-line hangs aslant. 
The present writer knows a case of a woman who 
very frequently awoke on Sunday morning repeat- 
ing to herself certain formulas of prayer. They 
were not familiar to her, and were never alike two 
Sundays in succession. After some time she dis- 
covered that they were scraps from the Anglican 
collect for the day. It is true that she must have 
heard the collects, though she had never studied 
them; but she certainly had no knowledge at all 
of their order in the Christian year. We cannot 



CHAP. V CORPORATE FAITH 47 

reasonably doubt that if the actual words of the 
many could thus upon rare occasion press into the 
consciousness of one without visible communica- 
tion, the mental inclination of the many behind 
the words would have a much commoner, if still 
more subtle, effect upon the one. 

The forces which govern man's corporate life 
are those which work chiefly upon the latent 
powers of his being.^ We are only beginning to 
discern them. Take, for example, the fact that 
it is easy to teach an ignorant child of ignorant 
parents to-day some conception current in our 
decade which the most brilliant men a century 
ago only grasped with eff^ort. Is telepathy the 
cause of this .? contagion of thought or feeling ^ 
suggestibility .? These are words of which the 
connotation is as yet imperfect, although by the 
realities which they denote we all live. The 
strength of a corporate movement among men 
may be terrible for good or evil, but that strength 
is commonly dissipated by the counter pull of 
other corporate movements. Thus, a man who is 

^ "What can be more complicated, more logical, more mar- 
vellous than a language ? Yet whence can this admirably organ- 
ised production have arisen, except it be the outcome of the 
unconscious genius of crowds ? The most learned scholars, the 
most esteemed grammarians can do no more than note down 
the laws that govern languages; they would be utterly incapable 
of creating them. Even with respect to the ideas of great men, 
are we certain that they are exclusively the offspring of their 
brains ? No doubt such ideas are always created by solitary 
minds, but is it not the genius of crowds that has furnished the 
thousands of grains of dust forming the soil in which they have 
sprung up ?" — The Crowd, by Gustave Le Bon, p. 9. 



48 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i 

a Freemason, a Churchman, a citizen, feels the pull 
of each communion; and 'in so far as the interests 
of each are different, he must not only be weaker 
in each but must weaken each. It is only in so 
far as the pull of each is good and identical with 
the pull of the others, that the individual can 
realise the whole strength of his personality, can 
"possess his soul." The man we have instanced 
cannot obey the counsels of perfection in the 
Church unless he is also obeying them in the State 
and in all other relationships. He cannot, as a 
Christian, act in obedience to the Sermon on the 
Mount, and at the same time, as a citizen, follow a 
contradictory code. Moral obliquity, intellectual 
dulness, is the inevitable result of the effort. The 
laws which God has made to govern mind are as 
certain in their operation as those he has made to 
govern matter. A plumb-line will not hang true 
plumb near a mountain; the attraction of the 
mountain interferes with the attraction of the 
earth. A man's Christian life cannot be true to 
the demand of Jesus if, not only his own civic 
life, but that of his fellows, is a deflecting mass. 

We thus see that probably there is no such 
thing as absolutely independent thought or feeling; 
nor can we admit the recent theorj^ of some 
psychologists that the more independent the 
thought, the higher its level. Although the 
diseases of the corporate life, i.e., mental epidemics,^ 
certainly show an abnormal dependence of one 

^ The following list of such epidemics is given in The Psy- 
chology of Suggestion by Boris Sidis : — 
Pilgrimage epidemic, 1000-1095. 



CHAP. V CORPORATE FAITH 49 

mind on another as their most prominent symptom, 
this does not prove the highest degree of mental 
independence to be the highest degree of mental 
health; as well say because men cannot live in 
a tropical sun that they would have the best 
health in the lowest temperature. The stern 
moralist is perhaps the highest instance of in- 
dependent thought; the genius is perhaps the 
highest product of sympathy with the world-mind. 
If there is an invisible bond of union between 
thoughts of saint and sinner, of Church and world, 
of class and class, of nation and nation, the Church 
can only be saved in the degree in which she saves 
the whole world. The whole race is corporate. 
A mental epidemic does not strike the Christian 
with one folly and the worldling with another. 
Out they go together. Christian and worldling, to 
dance the tarantella, to burn witches, to murder 
Jews, to invest in financial bubbles, to march to 
every war at the sound of trumpet and drum. 

Crusade epidemic, 

(Eastern and Western crusades 1 
Children's crusade J Vj / • 

Flagellant epidemic, 1 260-1 348. 
Anti-Semitic mania, following the Black Death, 1348. 

{St. John's dance, 1374. 
St. Vitus' dance, 1418. 
Tarantism, 1470 to end of 15th century. 
Demonophobia, or Witchcraft mania, 1488 to end of 17th 
century. 

{Tulipomania, 1634. 
The Mississippi Scheme, 1717. 
The South Sea Bubble, 1720 — and 
business bubbles to our own times. 
E 



50 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i 

Likewise, every good movement by which the 
race has increased its power of compassion and 
practice of justice has been corporate. Slowly, 
surely, healthily, the racial mind has moved, per- 
mitting the same ideas to be brought to birth 
often at the same time in lands and societies visibly 
separated one from another. Legislation — which 
means public opinion — on behalf of the debtor, 
the vanquished, the woman, the child, the slave, 
the beast, has extended in ways that man's con- 
scious political agitations only half explain. When 
we compare the religions, the ethics, the art, and 
science, of many and most diverse nations, beneath 
the differences that arrest the shallow and lead the 
reverent to look deeper, we find likenesses that 
can hardly be explained except by the great fact 
of corporate unity. Within Christendom pro- 
gressive movements affect alike baptized and un- 
baptized. Compassion for the oppressed, passion 
to discover truth — these, whatever local and 
temporary aspect they assume, infect mind after 
mind without any distinction of creed. Therefore, 
since every man is liable to the infection of his 
neighbour's ideas, be they good or bad, wise or 
mad, the Church can only have a perfect faith 
when she has converted the world to a perfect 
faith; and her degree of faith in any place and 
time will depend on the convictions she is evoking 
in her environment. The "serious man" did not 
say to Wesley, "You must not serve God alone"; 
he said, "You cannot"; and the psychology of 
the corporate mind bears out the non possumus for 
each one of us. Jesus strictly enjoined upon every 



CHAP. V CORPORATE FAITH 51 

disciple resignation to such suffering as has a 
directly saving effect upon the world — the bearing 
of reproach and tyranny in the spirit of love. He 
does not say that men v^ho v^ill not endure this 
redemptive pain must not count themselves his 
disciples; he says they cannot be his disciples. 
It is not possible, even to God, to give salvation to 
a man who is not ready in his degree to be a saviour. 

All his plan for the kingdom shows that Jesus 
knew that individual faith is dependent on corporate 
faith. He gave a glad, almost a surprised, wel- 
come, to every sign of individual faith, without 
criticism of its lack, and levelled constant reproach 
against the nation, the generation, and the religious 
classes of his tim.e for lack of faith. If faith in 
God is the highest exercise of personal power, all 
history shows that the field of personal power is 
the corporate life. When the corporate life is at 
its highest, and the individual is most closely allied 
to it, his individuality is at its strongest and his 
personal powers performing their highest functions. 

Thus we have seen that the faith of every 
individual is dependent upon the faith of his 
fellows, more dependent on the faith of those with 
whom he is in more intimate relation, but also in 
some degree dependent upon the corporate faith 
of the whole environment. The question of how 
far the human will is determined is not a question 
simply of how the sequence of states is governed 
in a man's own mind. If he could enter the arena 
of life without an ancestry, with complete will 
and intelligence, without a personal past, his mental 
condition would still be determined each moment 



52 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i 

more or less by the mental condition of every man 
who treads the earth with him. We have seen 
that the oftener a man herds with the same crowd, 
the less he can resist its influence; but unless he 
lives, sleeps, eats, and works with it, its influence 
must be greatly modified by the pull of every 
other relation of his life. The psychic law which 
governs him is that even when he thinks he girds 
himself and goes whither he will, another is always 
girding him and carrying him whither he will not. 
The laws of this involuntary brotherhood have, 
of course, lent themselves to every organisation by 
which men have thought to create brotherhood. 
Unless the race were a unity, no monastic order, 
no army, no family, no nation, no empire, 
could hold together. The thrill of patriotism or 
imperial spirit which passes from man to man, the 
sense of kinship between children that have played 
around one hearth, these have been evidences of 
the inner brotherhood of men too strong to escape 
notice, and are the forces that have been utilised 
in every organisation. Such bodies as had any 
particular object have used a partial sense of 
brotherhood for a partial end, and attained success; 
but organisations which have Christianity for their 
nexus have an interest in which all men share, a 
purpose which embraces every man. They have 
appeared to fail; perhaps because they have not 
sufficiently recognised that man's religious brother- 
hood is essentially and intrinsically universal. It 
is universal, whether he desires it or not, and a 
limiting organisation must be more or less false to 
the truth of this, and, although it gain its whole 



CHAP. V CORPORATE FAITH 53 

force from the brotherhood of man, must run 
counter to its essential rehgious aspect. 

If, for example, we have a certain sectional 
community in a certain town, the sect adheres by 
the natural laws which govern corporate life. 
Usually every member holds the doctrines of the 
sect more strongly the more he herds with its 
other members, and the more he endeavours to 
isolate himself from the larger interests of the 
town. Unless the isolation is complete, unless he 
live entirely with the brethren of the order, the 
full influence of the sect unit on the individual 
unit is not realised. Let us see to what this leads 
us. If the sect taught the truth, the whole truth, 
and nothing but the truth, if the ideal life could 
be lived without relation to the outer world, its 
organisation would then be the best training, 
sphere, and home for the individual. But what is 
the result in any organisation which has realised 
such complete union in isolation as, for example, 
some monastic orders .? We are all ready to 
admit that the result is not the realisation by its 
members of the whole truth or the ideal life. At 
its best it may be admitted to be something which 
has its niche in the larger brotherhood and the 
more universal ideal, but nothing more. No one, 
not even an advocate of such an order, will contend 
that it is more than this at its best. At its worst, 
it is a pest-house of mental freaks. Thus we see 
that a limited union and isolation at their highest 
in a religious body do not produce the best type 
of religious brotherhood. 

Let us inquire what light this throws on any 



54 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i 

association involving some degree of union and of 
isolation. It proves, at least, that some relations 
v^ith the outer v^orld are necessary for religious 
development. The general view of the Church is 
that she must maintain relations v^ith the world 
if only because she must exert missionary and 
charitable activities. She has not, however, evinced 
much interest in learning from the larger sanity of 
the greater number. She has conceived of her 
relation toward the world as that of teacher only. 
She has sought to restrict, as far as possible, her 
sense of companionship with the world to a sense 
of the world's need and the effort to supply it. 
Christian literature, written for those who meet the 
world in their various avocations, has gone to 
emphasise this attitude. Here we have a theory 
of life false to fact. The missioner, preaching to 
congregations of heathen or worldlings, the monk 
ministering to companies of vagrants, the devout 
lady taking her dutiful part in court or ball-room, 
all these return to their cloister or closet refreshed 
and made free from their morbid tendencies, not 
so much by their own activities as by mere contact 
with a fresh and wide mental atmosphere. As 
they stood face to face with men and women from 
the boisterous outer world, deep answered unto 
deep in their souls. Without volition, below 
consciousness, the laws of the universal brother- 
hood which God created and Jesus blessed worked 
to give them as much as they could receive of the 
strength of the universal mind. 

That the lives of devout Christians are not 
regulated by the desire to obtain all that the 



CHAP. V CORPORATE FAITH 55 

brotherhood of man has to give would appear to 
be a matter of great moment, not only because 
their theory puts the best of them as far as possible 
out of reach of the benefit of the race-soul which 
they ought constantly to receive, but because this 
theory puts the Christian out of harmony with 
the demand of Jesus, whose example and whose 
precepts are in absolute accord with the universal 
religious brotherhood of man. 

To sum up. The laws of corporate life form 
an invisible and universal bond, and complete 
independence of individual faith is impossible; 
complete independence of sectional religious life is 
equally impossible. The corporate life of faith 
must fall under the same laws as govern all 
corporate life. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE DOCTRINE OF PRAYER 

It was in his activities for human rehef that jesus 
exemphfied the certain result of faithful prayer. 
The belief about prayer almost universal in the 
religious world, both Jewish and pagan, was that 
when man had exercised repentance and obedience 
and made his humble petition to heaven it still 
rested with the divine will to give or to withhold. 
This was a most natural belief so long as men 
regarded the divine nature as free from what we 
might call principles of conduct, or as possessing 
only such laws of character as w^ere and must 
remain hidden from human understanding; but 
Christian writers err who assume that Jesus set the 
seal of his authority to it, prevalent as it was in 
the world of his day. In the most ancient litur- 
gies we find this belief — that uncertainty always 
waited upon prayer — constantly expressed along 
with beautiful aspirations of penitence and faith. 
We have read the deciphered prayers of "Assyrian 
kings who compose monotonous variations upon 
the three themes of pride, flattery, and fear." 

56 



CH. VI THE DOCTRINE OF PRAYER 57 

And this anxiety as to the result, the heaping up 
of argument in anguish lest the prayer be rejected, 
the much speaking in alternations of confidence 
and solicitude, are also the characteristics of nearly 
all the most exquisite expressions of faith in all 
religions. In the Hebrew psalms we are so much 
accustomed to this sort of prayer that we almost 
fail to notice it, or the profound contrast between 
this attitude of mind and that expressed in that 
psalm whose parallelism with the thought of Jesus 
is so striking. 

The lord is my shepherd. Our father in heaven. 

I shall not want. He leads Thy kingdom be within and 
me in green pastures and by around us. Thy will be 
waters of rest. done here as in heaven. 

Give us our daily bread. 

He restoreth my life. Forgive us as we forgive. 

He leadeth in right paths. Lead us aside from temptation. 

I will fear no evil. Deliver us from evil. 

Goodness and mercy shall All things whatsoever ye pray 
follow me always, every- and ask for, believe that ye 
where. have received them, and ye 

shall have them. 

All ages have been familiar not only with the 
ascription of arbitrariness to God by the religious, 
but also with their reverent method of accounting 
for it by assuming that the all-knowledge of God 
compared with the ignorance of man would fre- 
quently make God reject human petitions out of 
kindness, even those for forgiveness and the mere 
needs of life. In contrast to all this the supreme 
originality of the religious genius of Jesus is 
displayed in his insight into the uniformity 



58 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i 

of law in the religious life. It is evident that 
he had pondered deeply certain natural sequences 
in material things on which the utility of man's 
labour depended; and he certainly grew to believe 
in the uniformity of divine will in the whole 
realm of personal action. 

This was a new and startling conception, so 
new that the darkness of man's unbelief on all 
sides closed in on this ray of spiritual light, and 
even now it often seems only to flash hither and 
thither like a searchlight in a dark dawn. Yet it is 
indeed no searchlight, but a sun destined to rise 
in our sky. Jesus regarded faith as a cause which 
had a uniform effect. He argues that where 
the effect is the cause must be, and where the 
effect is not the cause cannot be. His formula, so 
often used, "Thy faith hath made thee whole," is 
an argument from the effect to the cause, addressed 
to the attention of all. He evidently thought it 
of great importance that his hearers should observe 
that the effect proved the cause. Such strong 
teaching he deals out to learned and simple, 
losing, it would seem, no opportunity to impress 
his followers. "According to your faith be it 
unto you." "O woman, great is thy faith (there- 
fore) be it as thou wilt." "I have not seen such 
faith . . . (therefore) go thy way, thy son liveth." 
Again, he unhesitatingly asserts lack of faith to be 
the reason why some desired effect was not pro- 
duced. When the disciples tried to cure the 
epileptic boy and failed, Jesus was not present. 
They had before this been away from him on 
missions of healing, and without his presence 



CH. VI THE DOCTRINE OF PRAYER 59 

had constant success. Why does he blame them 
now for lack of faith of which they were not 
conscious ? He is quite sure the cause is lacking 
because the effect is not produced — " Because of 
your unbelief." This was probably another of his 
formulas; it was deeply impressed on the minds 
of the evangelists as accounting for lack of benefit. 
To these sayings we must add the words of advice 
he gave to petitioners whose hope wavered, *' Be 
not afraid; only believe." "Believest thou? All 
things are possible to him that believeth." Beside 
these words let us lay the promises of Jesus — in- 
discriminate, unmodified, unstinted, mad, as it 
w^ould seem, in their calm certainty — of God's 
practical response to human confidence. He com- 
mends faith as a sure remedy to those in trouble. 
He gives positive promises of the divine gifts to all 
who will ask in faith. 

All this is something different indeed from 
other religious thought. Here is certainly no 
encouragement to love of the occasional and 
marvellous, no enhancing of the uncommon to 
prove a doctrine. Here is no suggestion that 
heaven must be moved out of its usual course 
by wailing liturgies and servile rituals. Still less 
have we here the doctrine of resignation to all the 
common ills of life as the highest form of worship 
that could be offered to the divine will. All these 
were varieties of religion that, in various extremes 
and combinations, had been offered to Heaven 
from every tribe and kindred since man first 
prayed, and are still offered. 

The natural sequences of sowing and growing, 



6o HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i 

of earning and gaining, of clouds and bad weather, 
are favourite subjects in the discourse of Jesus, 
but in deahng with them he constantly suggests, 
what is well known, that the result depends on 
many varying conditions. The same seed may 
produce nothing, or little, or much; the nicest 
calculations of gain, or of weather, may be dis- 
appointed. But the sequence of man's personal 
faith in God as a good Father and the personal 
gift that is returned by God he speaks of always 
as a law that works free from disturbance, as it 
were with mechanical certainty. Can we, then, 
for a moment suppose that he regarded personality 
as mechanical .? Did he regard the tide of 
spiritual life that flowed through him or through 
his followers as coming from God according to 
some psychical law which worked as it were 
automatically .? This would be inconsistent with 
his intense reverence for personality, divine and 
human, and is on all grounds unthinkable. It is 
evident rather that Jesus was convinced that 
abundant life, volitional, mental, and physical, 
proceeded from the Father's will always, toward 
all human creatures; that this flood of life, falling 
like sunshine, needed but the opening of the 
window in man's understanding, the will to 
estimate God aright, the will to pray, the will to 
believe. Man can only shut God out; when 
man's heart is open the influx of divine life is sure 
according to the ever-active purpose of God. 

The popular belief in the uncertainty of prayer 
was, and is, eating like a maggot into human faith 
everywhere. Jesus, contrary to popular belief, 



CH. VI THE DOCTRINE OF PRAYER 6i 

taught dependence upon the absolute uniformity 
of God's action. His doctrine of prayer, as 
exempHfied in his works, declares that certain of 
man's needs God will supply unfailingly and 
without delay — the gift of forgiveness, the gift 
of the Holy Ghost, i.e.^ God's indwelling support 
of joy and power, the gift of health, the gift 
of sanity and self-control. Explaining God's 
character in his own actions, teaching it by every 
reasoning and figure that his people could under- 
stand, he passed up and down the land for three 
years, proclaiming the invariable nature of God's 
will, encouraging by all that in him lay — character, 
action, word — that estimate of God which was 
the only human condition needed to ensure the 
accomplishment of the will on earth as it is 
accomplished in heaven. 

How reasonable is this account of the divine 
perfection ! A wicked man looking to God for 
restoration of soul, a sick man looking to God 
for health, asks for a boon which requires only 
the condition of his own faith and the action of 
God's spirit upon his own personality. Again, 
to give a man power to make or find sufficient 
for his daily material need only requires the 
adjustment of a man's wisdom and powers to his 
environment. So far, then, as God can act upon 
a man's body and will and environment directly 
through man's spirit, Jesus taught that he would 
naturally fulfil man's needs with that certainty and 
promptitude which is seen in all natural sequence. 
Prayer in these matters ought, according to his 
teaching, to have no element of resignation, for 



62 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i 

here resignation would be distrust of God's kind- 
ness. As to certain other contingent goods, 
matters of the hour, about which man, however 
great his sense of need, could not know that God 
would bestow them, Jesus taught that the Father's 
will was certain but the time of its accomplishment 
unknown. To all temporary suffering occasioned 
by delay there must be resignation. In these 
cases we find on examination that the event is a 
result, not only of God's action on man's in- 
dividual affairs through the personal power of 
one or more faithful souls, but of God's action on 
various classes of men and public affairs, where 
there is no unanimous human will. There is 
nothing mysterious in this distinction, nor is there 
any mystery in the fact that while a power of 
choice, however limited, is granted to humanity, 
any action of God upon large bodies of men and 
different classes of men must be a matter of time, 
pending the acquiescence and faith of multitudes. 
In such action the processes are so complex that 
no human vision could possibly calculate and 
foresee results. We may take, as example, the 
cessation of a national persecution. Will not 
God avenge his own elect ? He will, and that 
as quickly as his forbearance with the freedom 
of the wicked will allow. That is the gist of our 
Lord's teaching concerning those cases where the 
prosperity of the faithful depends upon the 
behaviour of communities and nations. There is 
here no more element of uncertainty as to God's 
intention toward man than in other cases; it 
presents him as never withholding of his own 



CH. VI THE DOCTRINE OF PRAYER 63 

accord, never considering that it is better for the 
suppliant to withhold a good thing, as always 
willing to grant a reasonable prayer and accom- 
plishing it as quickly as a uniform dependence 
upon the necessary condition in mankind will 
allow. The perfection of the Father is to exercise 
his love for the unjust as certainly as for the just, 
to patiently wait upon the perversity of the 
ungodly until through, it may be, the suffering 
of the godly and whatever other spiritual means 
may be brought to bear upon their spirits, the 
conditions of earthly things can, in the course of 
nature, be ordered to the answering of prayer. 
The good of those who pray could not be accom- 
plished at the expense of those who do not pray — • 
God could not be God and act thus — but the 
accomplishment of God's unvarying favour toward 
all is contingent upon human faith; and when its 
accomplishment depends, as it does depend in all 
social things, upon the increase of faith in whole 
classes of men, it is divine prescience alone that 
can foresee the time that will be required. 
Resignation as to the time of fulfilment is required 
in the hearts of those who pray for such needful 
things as depend upon the action of society, but 
not because God ever withholds the boon. The 
conception of God as torturing his children for 
their better discipline is not part of the doctrine of 
Jesus. 

Where in the four Gospels is there any teaching 
that disappointment in prayer is God's direct will 
for any man, either in the sense of punishment or 
of that prolonged discipline which figures so 



64 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i 

largely in devotional literature ? Those who 
enter the kingdom of God on earth are told to 
pray daily that God's will be done, in perfect faith 
that God wills for earth what is characteristic of 
heaven. Jesus never minimises the element of 
petition in prayer; he calls upon his followers to 
pray, not only that their needs may be met, but that 
their desires may be realised, knowing certainly 
that all good will come the sooner and the better 
for their asking; but when the petition passes 
beyond the health of the individual, soul and body, 
no man can foresee how long it will be ere the seif- 
governmient of the social order will render the 
fulfilment of the desire possible. 

The next great truth that is emphasised in 
this record of marvels is that while God will always 
restore to man the power and opportunity of self- 
government, he will never use force. We learn 
from the actions of Jesus that there is one thing 
God will never do, even in answer to prayer — he 
will never coerce the wills of men. 

The ordinary Christian explanation of as much 
of the problem of evil as we can reason about, 
is that, for the sake of evolving creatures who 
should have personality at once free and good, 
God risks and endures all the evil that is intro- 
duced into the universe by the gift of that power 
of choice necessary to personality and to goodness. 
Accepting this, the Christian explanation of the 
moral purpose for which evil is allowed to exist, it 
follows that such a modicum of free will as man 
possesses is the most valuable thing, because the 
most costly. God must value man's freedom 



CH. VI THE DOCTRINE OF PRAYER 65 

above all things, because without freedom his 
goodness would have no higher attribute than the 
goodness of a stone or a tree or a sheep. Just 
as inanimate rightness is meaningless compared 
with the rightness of anything that possesses vital 
force, so the rightness of man with some power of 
initiative must be an aim of God's system of 
evolution higher than any other terrestrial aim. 
The power to choose between good and evil is the 
means of man's salvation, and the only means of 
his salvation. In so far as he is coerced he is not 
being saved. Salvation cannot consist in carrying 
out God's will — all inanimate things carry out 
God's will — but in doing this by choice. (We 
mean here by "salvation" free righteousness and 
nothing more.) We have no reason to suppose 
that it is a worse thing for man freely to choose 
evil than to have no power of choice. Sin, on the 
Christian hypothesis, proves the possibility of good 
in the sinner. Of the possibilities of the ultimate 
salvation of a man who persists in sin in this world we 
know nothing, but we can clearly perceive that in the 
loss of free will there is no possibility of salvation. 

Thus we must perceive that the one thing God 
will not do in answer to prayer is to encroach on 
the limited domain in w^hich he has left man free. 
The value of every man's freedom may not appear 
to us an adequate explanation of sin and suffering, 
but it is the only explanation that we have any 
conception of, and it is folly to hold it in any 
sense an explanation and not perceive the greatness 
and the fineness of its issues. 

Where our first human records begin we find 

F 



66 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i 

man with that same belief in the advantage of 
coercing his fellows that seems to possess the whole 
animal world. When an animal, or a herd of 
animals, disapprove any action of their fellows, 
their efforts at coercion are prompt and violent; 
and so it is in human history. It is only where 
we find man beginning to reason from the failure 
of high-handed violence that persuasion may be 
temporarily necessary that he begins to use the 
gentler method. From its success we find him 
reasoning that it may occasionally be the more 
efficacious course. Up all the long, long roads 
by which our race has travelled from its beginnings 
to modern civilisation, we see a slow and gradual 
increase in the belief in gentler methods between 
rulers and their subjects, victorious nations and 
those they have conquered, between judges and 
criminals, between parents and children. Although 
this line of progress is so long, its advance so 
meandering, so slow, it leaves the reflective mind 
in no doubt as to the main direction in which it 
moves, although to realise how little we have 
advanced on the first human raiders, or the 
trampling herds that crashed through forests that 
fell before man rose, we have but to feel the pulse 
of Christendom when war is bruited, and listen 
to the voice of thousands of so-called Christians 
fanning the flame of the martial spirit. 

Corresponding with this slow advance, we find 
in all progressive religion the higher strains of 
inspired poetry attributing more and more the 
character of gentleness to God. "Thy gentleness 
hath made me great," was the epitome of the 



CH. VI THE DOCTRINE OF PRAYER 67 

highest rehglous experience before Christ came; 
and when he taught that he himself was the 
revelation of the divine will dealing with man, 
when he told us that God was a Father, and 
refused even in his moments of highest indigna- 
tion, or in his hour of dire necessity, to use power, 
he gave the lie to all that large religious mistake 
by which man in all time has attributed his own 
violence — the violence of weakness, his own mis- 
taken notions of justice — the justice of oppression, 
to the god he worshipped. "The prince of 
this world," "the kingdoms of this world," are 
our Lord's synonyms for this spirit. As warfare 
has been necessary for the evolution of the world, 
we can only suppose that warfare must be necessary 
for the salvation of mankind until man will listen 
to the counsels of love and peace, just as the sins 
of an individual must be necessary for his salvation 
until he will choose the right, because in both 
cases only the highest result could be worth so 
terrible a price. 

But if there is any growth in man's knowledge, 
if there is any progress in his character, if he has 
evolved any real wisdom out of his hours of 
reflection, if the Spirit of God has guided him, 
speaking with increasing clearness in the inner 
temple of his soul, if there is any truth in the 
doctrine of our Lord's divinity, man has learned 
that by gentleness, and only by gentleness, man 
can be made great. 

This is the light which struggled in darkness 
from the beginning, which in our Lord's time 
was not comprehended by the darkness, nor is 



68 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i 

yet; although we are all dimly aware that it is 
only to those who receive him on this understand- 
ing that he gives power to become sons of God. 

But how many prayers of the pious are still 
directed to the hope of the divine coercion over 
human action ! The saints have asked that they 
themselves may be coerced into goodness, and 
that their persecutors may be coerced into justice 
and mercy. They seem to think it most inexplic- 
able that our Lord will not remake men so that 
they will not sin. If when on earth he gave men 
health, if he cast out their unclean spirits, if he 
fed them and gave wine for their feasts, why did 
he not do the one thing needful, and give them 
hearts that would not sin and minds that would 
not err .? It is these latter boons that we in our 
folly desire of his power, and we do not see that 
just these would deprive us of the salvation he 
came to give. 

These baffled expectations have left their legacy 
of negative conclusions also; for if God, when 
besieged by prayer, will not stay the hand of the 
persecutor until, by God's long-suffering, the will 
of the persecutor is altered ; if God will not check 
high-handed oppression of class over class, or 
prevent the economic crimes that mean the suffer- 
ing of thousands, and, what is more, if he will 
not coerce his votaries into the goodness they so 
passionately desire and do not feel able to achieve, 
then disappointed suppliants think it follows that 
the age of beneficent marvels is passed, that we 
must find some other explanation of our Lord's 
promises to prayer than a literal one, and regard 



CH. VI THE DOCTRINE OF PRAYER 69 

his benevolent marvels as local and temporary. 
The Church, having discovered that obedience, the 
patient training of himself to obedience, is the 
condition upon v^hich the grace of virtue and 
insight into divine wisdom is granted to a man, 
has gone on to teach that this is the only 
condition on which all prayer will be granted, 
and also that all prayer for material benefits 
must be made only in a spirit resigned to its 
rejection. This was not the teaching of Jesus. 
The graces of the spiritual life do depend, because 
they must, upon man's free obedience to the whole 
law of love : all such personal benefits as are 
material and merely mundane, but will help him 
toward that obedience, are freely offered to the 
prayer, not of resignation, but of assurance. We 
cannot doubt that it was to put man in the most 
favourable position for receiving spiritual blessings 
by making his power of choice more untrammelled, 
as well as to persuade him that God was good — 
so good that obedience to him was the greatest 
happiness — that our Lord's ministry was char- 
acterised from beginning to end by the free gift 
of health and self-control and lavish means of a 
simple life; faith in God's good will, the assurance 
of faith, being the only condition. Although in 
this day we may have a more general spiritual 
insight, the corporate mind of that day was more 
prone to the reception of the physical gifts Jesus 
gave, so that this perfect assurance of faith was 
possible to many. We need to recover this 
corporate faith in the physical gifts of God. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE PLACE OF THE KINGDOM IN THE STRUGGLE 

TO SURVIVE 

The very nature of the struggle for survival 
through long world-ages emphasises in every living 
creature the characteristics of greed and hatred. 
It is, and always has been, as the individual, brute 
or man, fights, and as he gets, that he survives. 
It is true that the principle of love has always 
been concomitantly developed; for the individual 
as a unit cannot survive long except in the larger 
unit of family, tribe, and nation, and for the forma- 
tion of these larger units love is necessary. But 
the unit once formed, whether large or small, 
survives, as compared with like units, by its 
capacity for greed and hatred, so that these 
qualities continue to be developed by exercise. 
The aim of these combatants is always to claim 
their rights or, as we say, justice. Fighting men 
never agree with their opponents in the applica- 
tion of these terms. 

Jesus came to create a universal unit — man- 
kind at one, therefore at one with God. This w^as 
his "kingdom of heaven"; and he perceived that 

70 



CH.VII THE PLACE OF THE KINGDOM 71 

for the formation and coherence of such a universal 
unit the faculties of love must be developed at 
the expense of hate and greed, to the atrophy of 
hate and greed, in the v^hole race. We can well 
imagine that this is man's necessary development 
if he is not to pass, as all other forms of life have 
passed, destroyed ultimately by his own fighting 
qualities; for if a world-empire, or a church, 
should become universal by these latter means 
they must, grown lusty by exercise, be turned 
within as soon as there is no scope for them with- 
out — for character is formed by action and trans- 
mitted to children's children. The doctrine of 
Jesus was clear, that man would only be at one 
with God as he was at one with all his fellows. 
He taught that there was no atonement between 
God and man without perfect atonement between 
man and man. This was a conception of trans- 
cendent genius. 

The question which Jesus must have asked of 
the light within him was, how this conception 
could be realised, how love could triumph over 
hatred and greed — love, with its desire to give 
rather than to get, and to cast down every barrier 
by forgiveness ^ 

Was it possible so to manifest to the world 
the glorious joy of perfect love that hatred and 
covetousness would pass before its light as dark- 
ness before the sun ? 

The first expression of his ministry was the 
lavish gift of all that he had to give, together 
with the ascription of perfect love to God and 
the description of what would be perfect love in 



72 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i 

man. God was good to the unthankful and the 
evil, and man must be good to his enemy. No 
eye but his own could see the glory of it. They 
were all stumbling and carping, like fretful 
children. *'Lord, how oft shall my brother sin 
against me and I forgive him ?" was the highest 
reception of his news; and the lowest, "He casts 
out devils by the prince of the devils." In what 
way could they learn what this conception of 
universal love was .? He talked about the love 
of God, free and tender as a father's to a child, 
and found that the mind of the Church of his day 
was full of the observance of the sabbath and 
ablutions and tithings. He talked to them about 
love of man to man, so great that it could resent 
no injury, so sensitive that it could do no harm, 
and his own disciples responded with rivalries as 
to place and power. 

Jesus regarded meekness under wrong as the 
highest exercise of love toward a blind and per- 
verse people, and advanced this as the most 
undeniable argument for the power of love, an 
argument which must arrest their dark minds 
and enter their darkened hearts. To whom would 
they listen ? Nominally, and to a certain degree 
in truth, they listened to their dead prophets, who 
had lifted up their voices and told the truth of 
God as they saw it, to a gainsaying people. To 
the profound insight of Jesus, gainsaying, contra- 
diction, perversity, and faithlessness in those to 
whom the message came was the essence of per- 
secution. It gave pain to the heart of God's 
messenger incomparably greater than any physical 



CH.VII THE PLACE OF THE KINGDOM 73 

pain. He always speaks of the prophets as suffer- 
ing persecution, although many of them were not 
the victims of tyranny. And when had they 
been hstened to .? Only when the patriotic motive 
of their preaching had been proved by their 
suffering of persecution. Here we come on the 
place of suffering in the scheme of Jesus. No 
one — materialistic Sadducee, law-worshipping 
Pharisee, publican or sinner — no one now doubted 
the inspiration or altruism of these dead prophets. 
They had endured the contradiction of sinners; 
they had been disbelieved by the perverse genera- 
tion whom they would have saved ; and the moral 
result upon a nation of persecutors was reverence 
for their character and word. Here, then, in the 
loving endurance of persecution, was the way that 
every one who would advance the kingdom must 
pass, until the kingdom be universal. " Blessed 
are ye when men shall persecute you. Rejoice 
and be exceeding glad, for so persecuted they the 
prophets." And therefore he said, "It must 
needs be that I suffer." This does not prove that 
there is anything divine in suffering; it proves 
that love is divine; and only by suffering can 
love deal with men who are animated by hatred 
and tenacious of possession and power. The 
remedial power of suffering endured willingly 
because of the love borne to him who commits 
the injury is obvious; but it is the man who 
inflicts suffering that is saved by it, not he who 
endures it. To endure willingly is the one proof 
of love which even hatred cannot ignore. The 
shepherd who gives his life for the sheep is good; 



74 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i 

none can dispute his goodness. The man who 
gives his Hfe for his friends loves them so that all 
men say that no love could be greater. It was 
the antiseptic efficacy, the redemptive force, of 
this proof of love to God and man, that caused 
Jesus to put so high a value upon it. It was the 
force of love and courage and benevolence involved 
in meekness, and not mere meekness, that he 
valued. There are few things more foreign to 
the ideal of Jesus than resignation under injury 
when inspired by any other motive than love to him 
who injures. The mother, the wife, who endures 
the cruelty of son or husband for love's sake, 
shielding by patience, winning by a cheerful meek- 
ness, has every man's reverence. But the same 
meekness exercised in order to obtain mere peace, 
or some form of favour, is universally despised. 
When injury is accepted patiently because he who 
injures is infinitely dear, a god-like peace is pro- 
duced; to accept it for any other reason is to cry, 
^* Peace, peace" when there is no peace. This 
affords a possible explanation of the text about 
the two swords. When Jesus was leaving his 
disciples, depriving them for the hour of his 
leadership — a leading of which universal love was 
the motive — when he knew that some little time 
must elapse before they could so enter into the 
meaning of his suffering, that his peace would be 
theirs, and the spirit of his almighty love would 
inspire them, he told them to provide themselves 
with swords. He also said, "He that takes the 
sword shall perish by the sword," as though he 
had said. Better the sword of self-defence, even 



CH. VII THE PLACE OF THE KINGDOM 75 

though death be the issue, than for a man to allow 
himself to be struck from any other motive than 
that of love. Yet the spirit of the sword is dis- 
loyal to the spirit of Jesus; after Peter's brave but 
angry sword-thrust in the Garden of Gethsemane 
he very quickly denied his Lord. 

There is nothing more significant of our need 
of Christian reformation than the fact that the only 
words we have to express the most prominent ideas 
of Jesus — love, meekness — are so degraded that 
many of us have no verbal translation for these 
ideas of his. To the Jew the lion-hearted Moses 
was the great example of meekness. Jesus had no 
use for men without a dominant purpose. It is 
only to such men that the kingdom is open, and 
only for such that its laws are operative. It is 
worth noting that on the few occasions where Jesus 
is recorded to have used the word "meek" it is in 
close connection with the idea of personal dominion 
— "The meek shall inherit the earth" ^ (an 
almost literal transcription of Psalm xxxvii. 11); 
again, "All things are delivered unto me of my 
Father. . . . Come unto me . . . for I am meek 
and lowly of heart"; ^ lastly, where Jesus is re- 
ported as applying the prophecy of Zechariah to 
himself, " Behold, thy king cometh unto thee 
meek." ^ While we still have Christian teachers 
who use the word "love" as if it denoted either a 
mawkish sentiment or an unreasoning passion, we 
may well be appalled as we realise that such a use 
proves that a large body of our people have never 
even caught a glimpse of the Christian ideal. 

^ St. Matt. V. 5. 2 St. Matt. xi. 27-29. ^ St. Matt. xxi. 5. 



CHAPTER VIII 

SALVATION BY JOY 

The highest theory that the world's rarest and 
best piety had arrived at before Christ came was 
the idea of salvation by suffering. The end was 
perfection; the way was pain. It is true that the 
vision of the mystic had given glimpses of a higher 
way, but this phase of insight was almost inarticu- 
late. The seers themselves could not assimilate it 
to the rest of their belief; it had given birth to 
no creed, either in philosophy or religion. "As 
far as the east is from the west so far hast thou 
removed our transgressions from us" is the song 
of a soul under the influence of this rare vision; 
and in its light he hears the divine answer, "As 
the heavens are high above the earth, so are my 
ways higher than your ways, saith the Lord." 
Man's way was the way of the moralist, therefore 
the isolated rays of the mystic vision had to be put 
under the horn lantern of a lower religious theory. 
Whatever the full meaning of the teaching of 
Jesus, it is certain that just so far as it was above 
the thought of his time, and so far as it was to be 
the light of all future generations, just so far it 

76 



CHAP. VIII SALVATION BY JOY 77 

must have been partially interpreted and darkened 
by what seemed necessary to the world of his day. 

How far he taught that the salvation of the 
world must come by suffering is a most vital 
question, nor does it seem to be difficult to answer. 
The end he preached was perfection; but the wav 
was joy, not pain. If it be objected that joy as 
we know it is but an incidental experience to him 
who would attain perfection, it may be replied 
that so is pain. Yet pain had been accepted as a 
means, as a discipline; Jesus substituted the 
discipline of joy. Further, for Jesus perfection 
was to be realised in a state of universal love. Its 
exemplar was the God who poured forth good 
upon just and unjust alike. Salvation was to begin 
and be accomplished in a kingdom of love; and 
love, although the highest joy, involves costly 
activities in the person who loves. He gives with- 
out measure; he forgives without measure. So 
far as this means suffering, the salvation of the 
world comes by suffering — the suffering of 
unrequited love. Suffering is incidental and 
temporary, but joy is necessary to salvation and 
to our idea of perfection. 

Joy cannot be perfect till the whole world is 
saved out of its separatism into the great at-one- 
ment of the reign of universal love. There is 
only one chance of winning the children of hate to 
the side of the children of love — it is the vision of 
hate in its worst colours and love in its best. This 
vision is only open to the eyes of men when the 
victim of ill-will suffers without resentment and in 
entire charity. St. Paul w^as probably prepared 



78 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i 

for his conversion by St. Stephen's martjTdom, 
not because St. Stephen died for his faith, but 
because in dying he manifested love and forgive- 
ness for his tormentors. Long afterward St. 
Paul, who must have seen many — not only 
Christians but Jews and pagans — die for their 
faith, wrote in a passage of great inspiration, 
"Though I give my body to be burned and have 
not love it profiteth me nothing." Nothing ! 
The kingdom of God gains nothing from any zeal 
or any suffering which is not offered out of the 
depths of love to God and man. 

The Christian must drink so deeply of the 
spirit of the Saviour that he will actually and 
tenderly love his brothers, his neighbours, and his 
enemies. All men come under one of these heads; 
there is no relation of life that is not covered by one 
of them. There is no salvation recognised in the 
Gospels that is not manifested by this income and 
output of love. This love will be more or less re- 
jected, and the consequent neglect or ills, petty and 
great, that arise from the animus of persecution 
are the only suffering which the Christian is 
called on to endure. Neglect and contradiction 
are inevitable to all men who are saved by loving, 
and are saving the world by loving it; but love 
remains the highest joy, whatever be its suffering. 

Thus we see that suffering is never to be courted 
for private ends. The individual can win his 
life only by expending his love for the sake 
of the corporate life, and whatever renunciation 
Jesus called on a man to make was to be the 
instrument of the world's salvation. "In your 



CHAP. VIII SALVATION BY JOY 79 

patience ye shall possess your lives" follows close 
upon "Ye shall be hated of all men for my sake." 
Whatever is done for the sake of the King, done 
as the King would do it, is done to advance the 
kingdom. Whatever is demanded for the sake of 
the Saviour of the world is demanded for the sake 
of saving the world. We need not regard it as 
a mysterious question whether suffering has a 
redemptive efficacy; it is a fact that what love 
suffers in its effort to save has a redemptive 
efficacy, and there is no other suffering which the 
Redeemer regarded as the will of God. When 
Jesus fully perceived that there was no way of 
meekness and love by which he could avoid the 
utmost cruelty of his persecutors, no way except 
that of coercion by superior force, it was then, and 
only then, that he spoke of suffering as the 
Father's will. It was only then that he found a 
difference between his own desire and God's, and 
resigned his own. The cup that the Father gave 
him was submission to the malice of men. It was 
of that hour he predicted, "I will draw all men 
unto me;" he called it "the hour of darkness" 
and "of the prince of this world." The cross 
was the culminating expression of the suffering of 
unrequited love. It was the symbol of the worst 
evil that mankind could inflict upon man, the 
extreme form of shame and pain; and it was to 
be embraced in spirit every day because it was 
pregnant with the world's redemption. 

At the same time the Christian does not through 
the pains of love suffer more than other men, and 
he has love's joy. Greater is the inevitable suffering 



8o HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i 

of non-Christians, who go on under the law of a 
lower stage of human development trying to save 
themselves at the expense of others by individual 
or corporate gain-getting and warfare. These do 
not expend their lives for others and thus save 
them ; they save their lives at the expense of others 
and thus lose them. Such a life brings its own 
inevitable loss, losing itself in the mere act of 
getting and fighting, by the gradual shrinkage of 
those powers of love by which man can enjoy 
either himself or his fellows or God. The punish- 
ment or destruction or loss of those men who 
seek to survive in some limited unit of family, 
class, or nation, is that they go on exercising those 
powers by which alone their unit can rise in rela- 
tion to other units. They are not to be pun- 
ished — they are punishing themselves ; they are 
not to be cast out — they are outcast. This was 
certainly the doctrine of Jesus — that to pass from 
the restricted unit, which flourished temporarily by 
hating and getting, to the universal union of God 
and mankind, which flourishes now and eternally 
only by loving and giving, was to pass from death 
unto life. To say this is to say that light came 
by the transcendent insight of Jesus. In order to 
see that light clearly we need to untwist the many 
strands of our conventional thought. 

Let us take the various reasons why love must 
be unrequited in the world. 

Love is possessed by an unquenchable thirst for 
perfection in her object. A man, if he be tenderly 
attached to father, son, brother, or friend, cannot 
allow in him any course of conduct inferior to the 



CHAP, viii SALVATION BY JOY 8i 

best without endeavouring to change his course by 
every means that promises success. Even when 
love is pure and strong, and uses only good means, 
the yoke of love will seem irksome to the object 
who prefers an inferior course of action, and con- 
sequently something less than love in his friend. 
Natural affection, sympathy, appreciation, con- 
fidence, delicacy of touch — these are the signs of 
love in its outflow, but they may exist without 
love. These signs of love without the core or 
heart of love's intensity in them make less de- 
mand, and they are therefore often preferred by 
the indifferent, by whom love is seen as unlovely, 
spurned, and put to shame. There is always 
something akin to shame in the suffering of un- 
requited love. This is what the Christian must 
suffer from the indifferent. 

It is in her natural outflow of affection, 
sympathy, faith, and a sensitive taste, that love 
suffers; therefore love that is weak out of 
cowardice puts on foreign qualities, an armour not 
her own — hardness, stupidity, distrust, pride, and 
vulgarity. These have no affinity with love, but 
weak love hides behind them. When strong love, 
exercising its own qualities, comes in contact with 
weak love, protecting herself by weak devices, the 
contest between them is very grave. The weakest 
love has a tenacity and intensity which indifference 
can never have. It delights in, but fears, the 
methods that strong love must use. Thus we get 
the conflict between one right and another, and 
we have the borderland where jarring missionary 
effort almost merges itself into petty persecution. 



82 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i 

Here, again, the strong love must suffer most. 
When, for example, the relatives of Jesus thought 
that he w^as beside himself and desired to w^ithdrav^ 
him from publicity, their motive, no doubt, v^as 
love. Love w^as St. Peter's motive when he spoke 
the remonstrance against the forecast of the cross. 
Love may have been Martha's motive v^hen she 
w^ould have called her sister from the feet of Jesus. 
The divergence of method betv^een love weak and 
fearful and love strong and brave is enough to 
cause the endless division which our Lord foretells 
where concord ought to reign — father against son, 
mother against daughter, etc. ; and in this there is 
no working of ill-will or the motive of positive 
hate. Here, again, the more Christ-like the love, 
the more it is repulsed and hampered; and this is 
again an aspect of the Christian's cross. 

But the worst ill-usage of love comes neither 
from indifference nor from love's own weakness, but 
from the outflow of the religious man's evil will, 
and that cruelty in him that arises from hatred. 
Impelled either by some evil power outside that 
makes for unrighteousness, or by the brain ten- 
dencies which he inherits from the long ages when 
he subsisted by robbery and violence, religious 
man has ever felt it right to interpret God's love 
by his own harshness. Thus he comes to think 
he does God service by despising or bullying or 
slaying his religious opponents. We have a legion 
of conventional Christian sophistries which insist 
upon calling everything which is not love by that 
sacred name, and speak of universal love in terms 
of opprobrium. 



CHAP. VIII SALVATION BY JOY S^ 

It is unlikely that such confusion of thought 
concerning Christian love could have been arrived 
at had it not been for the ferocity with which the 
Almighty was credited in attitude and action 
toward non-Christians. The ultimate fate of the 
non-Christian was painted by the early Church 
as very black indeed. This was only natural. 
For many centuries religion, both of Aryan and 
Semitic source, had dealt with tribal and national 
deities whose attitude toward the enemies of their 
people was vindictive. All literature was full 
of their triumphant cruelties. As soon as the 
Christian Church had visible demarcation such 
hereditary ideas fell into line with Christian 
thought, especially when persecution presented a 
sore temptation to reciprocal vindictive treatment. 
The words in the Gospels which adumbrated 
undefined notions concerning the region of de- 
parted souls were interpreted with ignorant literal- 
ness. When such a vast difference between 
the immortal condition of the Christian and the 
non-Christian (or more especially the pervert or 
excommunicated person) had been definitely 
established in common thought, it was necessary 
to common sense to believe that all well-disposed 
persons were Christians. If a man had a brother 
or friend, or even an enemy, who had done nothing 
particularly heinous, nor aroused the ire of ec- 
clesiastics, it was uncomfortable and unintelligent 
to suppose that God would put him to eternal 
torture. The result of this was, not a larger 
charity, but to degrade "Christian love" by mak- 
ing it cover whatever attitude of mind average 



84 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i 

Christian people evinced. It was well known that 
Christian love was a necessary attribute of the 
Christian. This knowledge was an abiding testi- 
mony to the impression Jesus had made. Even 
when the flame of this love died down and flickered 
in the socket, when the smoke and stench of every 
other sentiment went up from the Church, they 
must all be called love. The inauisitor must be 
thought to love his victim; the crusader must be 
held to have charity for the man he so wantonly 
slew; and every respectable form of crime must 
be held to be compatible with Christian love. 

We have, too, the very confusing fact that 
these travesties of truth are not wholly untrue. 
So near do hatred and love lie together in the 
depth of our life that it is almost impossible to 
distinguish the activities of the one from those of 
the other by any merely moral test. Nor is it 
possible for moralising man, calling both moral, 
to fail to attribute both to God. That is why 
the example that Jesus set of absolute love in very 
life and deed is so needful. It is by neglect of 
this guide that confusion has come about. In our 
hearts we have what appears to be a common 
source of missionary spirit and persecuting zeal, 
bitter waters and sweet coming, as it were, from 
the same fountain. But there is nothing of which 
Jesus seems more sure than of his principle, 
expressed in various ways, that when the fruit is 
bad the root is bad; that good, so mixed with 
evil in conduct, is separate from evil in the will. 

Cruelty can never be the fruit of love. If we 
let go this principle of Jesus, that the good will 



CHAP. VIII SALVATION BY JOY 85 

brings forth only good, we are in a labyrinth that 
none may thread, for persecution always derives its 
greatest strength from a sense of right. The 
persecutor not only believes that the man he 
persecutes is wrong, but wrong in such a way that 
it will be for his benefit to be annoyed or grieved, 
if only it makes him change his course. "Whoso- 
ever killeth you will think that he doeth God 
service" states the very raison d'etre of religious 
warfare. It may be truly said that no frivolous man 
is a persecutor, and that there does not live on the 
earth the conscientious man who would not, under 
certain circumstances, be strongly tempted to 
persecute. 

Although, in a certain superficial modern view, 
persecution has come to signify something so ill- 
judged that it is supposed no reasonable person 
could have recourse to it, we shall always have the 
persecutor until the kingdom of love is universal; 
and the children of the kingdom will suffer at his 
hand. We often think of persecution as tending 
merely to bring an undue odium on the persecutor 
and an undue glory on the persecuted; we say 
to-day that to suffer persecution amounts to being 
willing, at the cost of some slight inconvenience, 
to purchase undeserved notoriety and sympathy; 
and we suppose that, as Christians,we have attained 
to such a degree of civilisation that serious persecu- 
tion of the righteous has become impossible. We 
virtually assume that the blessing of Jesus on the 
persecuted has no modern significance. Reflection 
will show that human nature has not materially 
altered since the first dramatic record we have of 



86 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i 

the characters and actions of men and women. In 
the earHest Semitic romances and legends, in the 
Greek tragedies, in the poetry of the Dark Ages, 
in the drama of the Renaissance, and in the modern 
novel, we have substantially the same men and 
women, loving and hating under different con- 
ditions, but with the same practical result. The 
outward exhibition of persecution must needs be 
very different in different times; but as long as 
men hate one another the licensed cruelty of 
persecution will abound. 

To-day, as a usual thing, we do not maltreat 
our religious neighbours in any material fashion, 
although place, power, and wealth, or the strength 
of numbers, are sometimes used privately to penalise 
an objectionable form of religion. Persecution is 
thus outwardly softened, not because the spirit is 
unwilling, but because the flesh, through a recent 
acquisition of imaginative sympathy, is weak. 
Probably, through that same increase of sensitive- 
ness, good men suffer as much now as ever from 
persecution. Our governments are now democratic. 
To disturb the religious privileges of our neigh- 
bours, or increase our own, we must have recourse 
to the methods of the demagogue. The eager 
imputation, public and private, of unworthy 
motives, evil passions, despicable actions, to our 
opponents; the stirring up of strife, for our own 
religious ends, between two factions in a village, 
between two neighbours in one terrace, between 
two children in one school — who can tell the 
lingering pain of wounded hearts and narrowed 
lives that this entails ? If it does not produce 



CHAP. VIII SALVATION BY JOY 87 

widespread spiritual suffering of the most acute 
sort we are sunk low indeed, sunk lovv^er than any- 
thing that we can call Christianity. But, in truth, 
the pain is terribly real to every heart inspired by 
the love of God. 

Although the suffering of persecution was 
necessary to teach the world what the kingdom of 
heaven really was, that kingdom was not presented 
as dreary but as full of joy. Jesus said, "Blessed 
are ye when men shall revile you, and cast you out 
of the synagogue, and hold your name a synonym 
for evil, because you exemplify my character which 
is love." And love, whatever it suffer, is the 
greatest source of joy. The child of the kingdom 
was to be the recipient of all other joys. Jesus 
does not say, "Blessed are ye when attacked by 
disease, when bereaved of dear ones by premature 
death, when fortune has deserted you, when you 
are distracted by a thousand and one domestic 
cares — some one's insanity, some one's folly, some 
one's helplessness." All these forms of suffering 
were to be cast out of the kingdom. In the 
kingdom the mourner is to rejoice, the poor to be 
rich, the rich to be poor; the heartless shall weep 
for the sorrows of others ; the sick are to be healed ; 
infirmities of will are to be cured; food and 
clothing are to be secure. 

If Jesus had taught that to mourn for any and 
every cause in this world brought a special blessing 
on character and special comfort in the next, his 
own actions would have been quite inconsistent 
with his teaching, for he turned mourning into glad- 
ness in every case when the opportunity offered. 



88 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i 

If a sense of bereavement, caused by premature 
death and immature faith, were desirable for the 
strengthening of character — to make God and the 
things of God dearer, why should he have given 
Lazarus back to Mary, who had already drunk 
so deeply of his own teaching, or restored to 
Jairus his little daughter, or interfered, apparently 
without any request, to dry the tears of the widow 
of Nain ? If to be laid aside with sickness teaches 
men lessons of virtue and a knowledge of God 
which they can learn in no other way, or if sickness 
in one member of a family brings out the highest 
characteristics of pity and service in the others, 
why did he abolish this means of blessing in a 
thousand homes ? If the sight of a lost mind is 
desirable to teach intellectual humility, if to bear 
with the ill-balanced and uncontrolled is good for 
the spirit of man, why did he spend so much time 
and energy in the casting out of devils ? Nor can 
we acquiesce for a moment in the doctrine that he 
did these things to establish the fame of his divinity, 
and not to exemplify the eternal attitude of God 
toward man. For if he was indeed divine, these 
things must exemplify the divine dealing with men, 
and if he was not divine he could not wish to claim 
divine power. If, again, it be argued that this 
was his way of exalting his m.essage, which did not 
deal with material gifts, we must reply that nothing 
can exalt a message that is not in absolute harmony 
with it. If he had taught that there was a virtue 
in mere poverty, in want as want, how could 
his early followers have even imagined that he 
would provide a lavish banquet for the wedding 



CHAP. VIII SALVATION BY JOY 89 

feast, or spread so plentiful a meal in the 
desert ? 

The Holy Spirit, with whom the disciples of 
Jesus were to be endowed as far as they had faith 
to receive him, was to be manifested in a sense of 
God's perfect forgiveness and blessing, in an over- 
flow of wisdom and gentleness and good will, and 
also of physical health — health suflicient to heal 
others. How great would be their joy ! Health 
is a keen relish to the varied feast of life. Perfect 
health of body and mind is not only strength but 
also temperance in every feeling and every pursuit. 
If we accept the lesson the historic Christ taught, 
we must perceive that this great physical joy 
underlay the joy of the Spirit, the imparting of 
which was the glory of his message. 

The rejection of a vice, and of all that feeds 
or tempts it, may be — often is, by a stretch of 
language — called salvation by suffering; but in 
the application of that term to it there is no sense 
of proportion, no common sense; for continuance 
in vice means greater suffering. For example, we 
read to-day of thousands of Chinamen eagerly 
curing themselves of the opium habit, destroying 
costly pipes, and quantities of the drug itself, in 
symbol of their complete conversion. Is their 
relief from this craving, their return to a whole- 
some life, a sorrow or a joy .? They themselves 
answer, "Joy.'' Every drunkard, every slave of 
any vice, who testifies to the sudden reformation 
which the command of Jesus to cut off the offend- 
ing member so exquisitely describes, echoes the 
word "joy." Asceticism would have given a 



90 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i 

different command. "If thy hand or thy foot 
offend thee, punish or mortify it every day of thy 
hfe." The faith of Jesus always leaped forward 
to meet the joy on the other side of heroism, with 
perfect confidence in the power and will of God 
to make the promise good. 

If in any case Jesus had intimated that mis- 
fortune came from God, that sickness was more 
desirable than health, or mental infirmity better 
than the power of self-control, the whole gospel 
would have been other than it is. He did not 
regard depression of spirits, from any cause, as 
salutary, for he promised to give his followers a 
constant joy, and he commanded them to wear a 
cheerful demeanour which would hearten others; 
he commanded freedom from care. There are 
indeed no griefs, no forms of pain, to which Jesus 
calls men to resign themselves except those which 
result from the hostility of men. Such pain is 
to be embraced in joy because of its rich reward. 

We have seen that in the doctrine of Jesus the 
end to be attained was perfection, that perfection 
to his mind was synonymous with love and also 
synonymous with God. To be perfect was to be 
like God; to be like God was to be like a loving 
father who comprehends the just and the unjust, 
the good and gracious, the unthankful and evil in 
his unceasing benevolence. Participation in the 
joy of God, transcendent yet immanent in all 
nature, is the dynamic force which alone can raise 
the Christian to this altitude of love. Joy makes 
a man magnanimous, gives him courage, gives 
him hope, gives him the strongest motive for 



CHAP. VIII SALVATION BY JOY 91 

imparting to another. The first real taste of the 
joy of God comes as the wine of hfe, and hfts a 
man above all littleness, all discouragement, all his 
inheritance of dim animistic fear. In the concep- 
tion of Jesus it appears that love, even under the 
most extreme misery of rejection and persecution, 
has in it more joy than sorrow. Just as the 
soldier in dying may rejoice that he dies for the 
sake of his country, so the Christian in suffering 
torture and contumely for exercising love has more 
joy than pain, because he suffers for God's sake. 
But in the Christian's case there is another element 
of joy which the soldier has not; the Christian 
loves the enemy or persecutor who inflicts the 
suffering, and is taught by Jesus to believe that 
that love will not be wasted, but will be a force in 
the remission of the persecutor's sin. 

The cross which the Christian must take up 
daily is the suffering of love. The life he must 
lose, the denial of his own ends that he must 
practice, are all included in the activities and 
consequences of that love for men which he must 
drink in with the Spirit of God. Other suffering 
Jesus does not enjoin or bless. Other pains exist 
as sin exists. From them, as from sin, Jesus 
offers salvation. Further, the one form of suffer- 
ing that he blesses, the suffering of unrequited 
love, is not blessed because it is suffering — not at 
all — but because it is the quickest way to bring 
the whole world into the paths of love and joy 
which lead to perfection. 



BOOK II 
THE FATHER'S HOUSE 



93 



CHAPTER I 

THE CONFLICT OF THE PHYSICAL AND MORAL 

Before we can realise how hard it was for the 
high conception of salvation which Jesus taught 
to obtain possession of the developing world-mind, 
we must examine the history of the earlier idea 
that man's salvation has to come by suffering. 

After religious systems had been developed, 
and before the Christian revelation, we can 
trace two tendencies in the evolution of human 
thought with regard to the unseen: the state 
in which man, whenever he did not feel any dis- 
union with the forces about him, had the sort of 
happiness that the animal world evinces, and 
whenever he suspected himself of being in need 
of reconciliation with unseen power, used an easy 
method of ceremonial reconciliation which set him 
at ease; secondly, the state when man began to 
doubt the efficacy of this method. These 
tendencies of thought, representing two stages, 
are still traceable in the religion of the civilised 
individual to-day, and form a curious problem 
for the psychologist. From the religious history 
of the world, as far as we can read it now in the 

95 



96 THE FATHER'S HOUSE book n 

traditions and writings that have been handed 
down in all nations and in the unearthed records 
deciphered in the last quarter of a century, it 
seems clear that all different tribes and nations 
did go through these transitions, although they 
are indistinctly seen because the men of higher 
insight in any nation are, in mere point of chrono- 
logical development, ages ahead of the mass of 
their fellows, and those in the rear are not less 
prolific in religious expression. The first stage 
may have given rise to the myth of early innocence 
present in more than one legend of the dim past. 
St. Paul seems to have been familiar with the same 
sort of idea, to which the thinkers of his time 
had come, not by history but by reasoning, viz., 
that before the inward moral law was perceived, 
the race, like the child, must have felt itself 
innocent. 

We first meet our fellow-man conforming to 
a series of enactments which gave him a very 
large area of conscious obedience and a joyful 
sense of his god's approval. These enactments 
were for the most part non-moral; religion meant 
that the god had made a covenant to approve and 
aid man as long as man kept them; when they 
were broken the question of motive did not 
enter at all into the matter; the breaking might 
have been inadvertent, it might have been un- 
avoidable; but the guilt had to be atoned for 
at once by certain ceremonies, or the quality of 
guilt spread like physical infection to the inno- 
cent family and race. All guilt was crime; but 
crime was, on the whole, in early times some- 



CH. I THE PHYSICAL AND MORAL 97 

what recondite; and whatever was not crime was 
bhssful innocence. Atonement was made by 
simple ceremonies and a gift. Cain's sacrifice 
was at one period amply sufficient; but, with a 
deepening sense of the gulf between man and the 
unseen powers, it became necessary to offer a life 
— not a death, but a life. In the Semitic races 
it became gradually established that the life was 
in the blood, and blood was offered, but surely 
with no idea of pain, as almost every sacrifice 
involved a feast, and the idea of putting the 
animal to death bv torture to make the sacrifice 
more acceptable was unknown. 

Satisfaction in life is marred by the growth 
of the sense of personal responsibility — the effort 
after an ever-receding ethical ideal. On the first 
suspicion any man anywhere has that he is morally, 
not merely ceremonially unclean — actually, not 
merely legally, a sinner — perfect joy in physical 
strength and beauty is gone; art ceases to be 
happy and loses its first perfection. He goes 
on to realise that there is in his members a law 
of sin and death — sin of his own deep essence, a 
real "ought" within which he cannot satisfy by 
obedience to any code, and which would not be 
appeased by offering anything external to himself 
to any deity who could accept such offering. 
Then falls upon that man the shadow of conscious 
sin. The sunshine of nature was darkened long 
before the hour of Calvary. Blight comes with 
lack of sunshine; the first blossom of naturalism 
withers; efforts after beauty and harmony bear 
less fruit; music is plaintive; every honest rep- 

H 



98 THE FATHER'S HOUSE book n 

resentation of the awakened human Hfe is satiric 
or tragic. In this man, and with cumulative 
strength in his children's children, two opposed 
passions rise and grapple together, like Jacob and 
the Angel of God, the material man demanding 
material good, the moral man demanding the 
unison of might and right — the legitimate demand 
of the body upon a faithful Creator for the un- 
alloyed delight of its every sense; the ever- 
growing demand of conscience for moral perfection. 
The existence of the body and its senses stands, 
must always stand, for a real, if unrealised, 
covenant of faithful creator w^ith sentient creature. 
The physical nature is not responsible for existence, 
and claims, therefore, with unerring instinct the 
right of realising every natural hope — a right 
that no sophistries can diminish. The increasing 
imperative of the moral nature demands harmony 
between the real and the right, demands that the 
material world, the body, the universe if need be, 
shall be sacriificed to the "ought." We see these 
two inappeasable passions strive together in the 
long night wherever in the world man rises above 
mere material joys and primitive ceremonial. 
The Angel of the Lord grapples with Jacob and 
sets him on his way halting. Everywhere, in 
all nations, the moral standard rises, or the race 
perishes; but as the moral standard rises, the 
physical nature is lamed. The early delight in 
mere living fails, leaving only a poetic tradition 
of man's first paradise, his Golden Age — a source 
of longing, an infinite regret. 

There is no reason for regret. The non- 



CH. I THE PHYSICAL AND MORAL 99 

moral man who could eat, drink, and be merry 
whenever he had no cause for fear, and who when 
afraid could satisfy his gods perfectly by the very 
ceremonies of eating, drinking, and being merry, 
who was content to die on the morrow without 
a thought of an after that was not fulfilled in the 
life of his tribe — this man did not persist. The 
halt creature, the moral man, was fitter to sur- 
vive, did survive. Wailing out prayers, singing 
penitential psalms, crying after a God who 
desired righteousness, not of ceremony but of 
the thoughts of the heart — this man grew and 
multiplied, and built greater cities and framed 
better laws; but physical beauty palled on his 
taste; his arts reflected his grief; unaffected joy 
was lost. In this transition the earlier Vedic 
tribes add to the worship of their cheerful gods 
the cult of the gloomy fakir; the golden calf of 
the dancing Semite is given up for the ark of the 
covenant which it is death to touch; the sunny 
pantheon becomes the gloomy, if more beautiful, 
Gothic sanctuary where the light of heaven may 
only enter stained by carnal crucifixions and 
bloody martyrdoms. Though the moral man 
was stronger than the non-moral and superseded 
him, he had plucked out an eye, he had cut off 
the member that offended : halt, maimed, and with 
one eye, he entered into life — otherwise he would 
have passed, as all that is unfit passes. Before 
man could dream of a further perfection he must 
learn to prize virtue before all things. 

Before he can attain that further perfection, 
man must find out how to be good and whole- 



UOFC* 



100 THE FATHER'S HOUSE book n 

hearted at the same time. The body cannot be 
filled with the fulness of the Lord until it resume 
the physical perfection of unspoiled nature. 
Even in the childlike symbol of primitive ritual, 
nothing maimed, broken, or blind could be 
offered to the Lord; how much less in any real 
sense can the God of nature inspire with the 
beginning of a perfect and progressive righteous- 
ness a race that has lost half its power of enjoy- 
ment, that corresponds with its environment so 
imperfectly that the individual must always be 
cherishing his soul at the expense of his body, or 
his body at the expense of his soul. 

When Jesus began his ministry the whole 
religious world was practically divided into two 
minds and two tempers. The poor in spirit and 
the meek were busy crying, "Blessed is the man 
whom God chasteneth;" while, on the other 
hand, those in every nation who in mind and 
temper were not poor in spirit, but yet were 
concerned for salvation, still clung to legal devices 
which became more and more elaborate. With 
these latter the explanation of suffering was still 
that it was the punishment of sin: "This mul- 
titude that knoweth not the law are cursed," 
is the epitome of the moving sermon attributed 
to Moses in Deuteronomy. The way to escape it 
was to be sinless ; the way to be sinless was to con- 
form to a legal code. As suffering was the direct 
punishment of immediate sin, there was no need 
for an uncomfortable degree of compassion for 
those who suffered. To draw back the skirts 
and pass on was legitimate to priest and lawyer; 



CH. I THE PHYSICAL AND MORAL loi 

and as long as personal suffering was escaped the 
faithful legalist did not anticipate it: he thus got 
rid of compassion, compunction, and apprehension; 
he thanked God that he was not as other men; 
he said that the people that knew not his law were 
cursed. But, as we have noted, this was no 
longer the only interpretation of suffering. The 
idea of salvation by suffering had been welded 
into the heart of the better sort of pious men 
everywhere by the development of conscience that 
rendered mere animal joy insufficient, by the 
teaching of the prophets, and by the imperative 
demand of human reason for a soul of good in 
things evil. The refining result of suffering 
upon the character of the sufferer is the first 
benefit to be extracted from the mystery of pain. 
This result is obvious, it has been noticed by 
all people whenever a race has reached the stage 
of moral reflection. Such a plan of salvation 
was familiar to the Buddhist, to the Hindoo, to 
the Persian, to the Alexandrine Greek, and, above 
all, to the pious Jew of the Christian era; the 
large use made of chastisement for the moral 
interpretation of experience in the books of the 
Apocrypha and the Apocalyptic literature is very 
striking. 

This distinction between the two classes of pie- 
tists was very clear among the Jews at the time 
of our Lord, and other Semitic religions were 
going through the same phase. The two classes 
of religious thinkers were like antiphonal choirs, 
and their views were alternately contrasted and 
confused in the national psalms that went up to 



102 THE FATHER'S HOUSE book n 

God. We cannot doubt that the Father, pitying 
his children, accepted the worship of both; we 
cannot doubt that they who mourned for sin, the 
meek and lowly, who looked to sorrow rather than 
to law as a means of grace, were on a higher plane, 
more blessed because more ripe for comfort, more 
ready to inherit the earth and possess the kingdom 
of heaven. 

All the time, even through the long past in 
which these different ideas of salvation had been 
growing, apart from the fire and apart from the 
whirlwind, there had been another voice, proclaim- 
ing a God of greater power and more resource, 
whose ways were higher than man's ways as the 
heaven was higher than the earth, a voice so still 
and small that it obtained little authority with men 
till Jesus came to give it authority. This was his 
news — that not by legal obedience, nor yet by grief, 
could men learn to know God, but by the dynamic 
power of his joy. To him the salient characteristic 
of God's kingdom on earth was that they that 
mourn should rejoice. He perceived, as others 
did not, that a contradiction was involved in 
crediting heaven with the fire that consumed the 
sacrifice. 



CHAPTER II 



THE USE OF SIN 



There is a large tendency of thought which, 
in order to ensure God's omnipotence and moral 
character, seeks to regard moral evil as a good 
means to a good end. We are here assuming — 
what was the belief of Jesus — that for any man to 
choose the lower instead of the higher path is a 
wrong to himself, to mankind, and to God. This, 
however, is not to assert that the spirit of good 
may not borrow some advantage from things evil. 

But the idea of sin as a saviour is not satisfactory. 

St. Paul says all that can be said as to the place of 

sin in God's scheme of salvation : the moral law, 

which makes sin, is a schoolmaster that brings 

. . .° 

men to God. Without a law there is no sin; 

without sin there is no knowledge of the eternal 

demand for a course of right action to which men 

cannot, of their own powers, attain. What is it 

that drives most persons at first to any experience 

of God's grace ^ Is it not the burden of sin ? 

Some saintly people there may be who enter the 

kingdom and grow strong therein without such 

transgression of the law of inward rectitude as 

103 



104 THE FATHER'S HOUSE book n 

drives them to demand of God some personal 
assurance of forgiveness and help; but if there are 
any such they are very few. The overwhelming 
majority of the devout have found God at first, 
and most constantly, and in some crisis have 
experienced the deepest knowledge of his self- 
revelation, because of their sins. As Julian of 
Norwich shrewdly remarks, "For it needeth us to 
fall, and it needeth us to see it. For if we never 
fell, we should not know how feeble and how 
wretched we are of our self, and also we should not 
fully know the marvellous love of our Maker. . . . 
And by the assay of this falling we shall have an 
high, marvellous knowing of love in God, without 
end." ^ We have many saintly authorities on this 
gracious utility of sin; but we may turn to the 
highest. When Jesus confronted the Pharisee with 
the riddle of the two debtors, he virtually said, 
"The greater a man's sin the greater his love to 
God"; and if we would partly explain this away 
by making consciousness of sin, and not its abun- 
dance, the cause of man's love to God, we still 
cannot get rid of the fact that Jesus in this parable 
still speaks of sin as the root out of which this 
sacred growth of worship springs. Or take the 
inverse truth, which he taught most strongly, that 
God's heart goes out after the sinner because of 
his sin, and God's saving energy will not be baffled 
in revealing itself to those who are lost, although 
it may fail to save those who are a law unto them- 
selves. It has not been the fashion in the Church 
to dwell on the godly utility of sin ; if it were, we 

^ Revelations of Divine Love, Chap. 6l. 



CHAP. II THE USE OF SIN 105 

should all be taking note of the enlightenment 
which has con^e to our souls through our sins, and 
writing of it in our memoirs. 

Another consideration with regard to sin is that 
in the concrete there is no clear line of distinction 
between moral good and moral evil or between 
moral and physical evil. That there is a vast differ- 
ence between certain goods and certain evils does 
not diminish the force of the fact that there is no 
boundary-line except in thought. We are there- 
fore bound to accept sin as a factor in the moral 
progress of man. Take, for example, the case of 
a primitive tribe of men whom we may suppose to 
have risen above the sins of killing members of 
their own tribe without due offence, and above 
cannibalism. Some cataclysm of nature inflicts 
famine upon them. They suffer evil acutely in 
its three forms, — pain, the ugliness of physical ruin, 
and the relapse into the brute. They fall to killing 
and devouring one another, and by so doing they 
survive and rise again in better times. Their 
behaviour is that of a herd of beasts who, when 
similarly put to it, would similarly preserve them- 
selves. Can we say that if it is right for the beast 
it is wrong for the savage ? If the savage has that 
glimmer of moral light that makes it wrong, are 
we sure that the animal has not ^ It is wiser to 
admit that we have no knowledge that warrants 
such inference ? Again, can we say that when any 
human society, visited by calamity, falls from better 
to worse, there is no moral evil as part of the cause ? 
Can we in such a case make any distinction between 
the evil they do and the evil that is thrust upon 



io6 THE FATHER'S HOUSE book n 

them ? Good and evil, physical and moral evil, 
are here v^elded together. If we try to apply the 
religious idea and ask where God's will is in 
harmony with his creation and where it is violated, 
we must perceive that many of our conventional 
ideas have little basis. The position of the commu- 
nity in our city slums; the condition of every child 
born and trained in their depraved atmosphere, 
is analogous to that of the primitive tribe in point 
of moral responsibility. The starving child who 
steals a loaf and survives is probably fitter to 
survive even for moral ends than one who shows 
less resource and dies. In such cases our moralists 
are wont to point out that the bad behaviour 
thus thrust upon each generation was first the 
behaviour of their ancestors. This, however, can- 
not be urged of the primitive tribe we have cited; 
and the likeness between the childhood of the 
race and that of each generation in respect of 
moral behaviour is so close that there is a strong 
presumption that a distinction not found to be 
actual in the one is not actual in the other. 

The religious mind which calls its God the 
creator and sustainer of all, must face the fact that 
in the extricable confusion of good and evil his 
sustaining activity must be engaged. God's pur- 
pose is, we believe, the advance of man toward a 
positive good that will overcome evil. The mere 
negation of wrong can have no value for him. 
The man who sins is higher in the scale, more 
approved of God, nearer to the divine nature, than 
the vegetable or animal which obeys God's law 
perfectly because it cannot do otherwise. How 



CHAP. II THE USE OF SIN 107 

beautiful to us, how fresh and strong, does this 
dutiful aspect of nature appear ! Yet the man 
who can choose between right and wrong, and 
chooses, even if he choose wrong, is still above all 
enforced good. In religious fact, as opposed to 
religious theory, sin, although only a bad bye- 
product of free will, is a stepping-stone to higher 
things. It has a degree of good in it. It must 
be, in some sense, God's will. It is used by God 
as a means to work out his own purposes, as the 
lives of the greatest and best men all show. 

Can we, then, argue that God sends sin for our 
salvation.^ to brine; us to himself.^ "Shall we 
continue in sin that grace may abound.^" We 
exalt the saving grace of pain in our religious 
biographies; shall we exalt the saving grace of sin 
also ^ As a matter of fact, we lose hold of the 
strong common sense of all true religion when we 
do this; we cease to be pure in heart and cease to 
see God. 

This has nothing to do with the metaphysical 
argument by which evil may be proved to have no 
reality. We are not dealing with the problems of 
metaphysics but with the facts of life, and such fair 
inferences from them as may tend to correct our 
conventional estimate of God. 

We have seen that while there is a sense in 
which sin is part of God's plan for man's salvation, 
we refuse, and rightly, to regard it as God's will 
that any man should sin. Have we any more 
justification for regarding it as God's will that he 
should suffer ^ 



CHAPTER III 



THE USE OF PAIN 



The grave difficulties attending any attempt to 
reconcile belief in God's universal providence with 
the almost universal existence of sin v^hich we 
believe he must abhor, remain unsolved; mean- 
while it does not make the problem of evil simpler 
to represent God, while hating sin, as actually 
visiting pain and grief upon sentient creatures. 
It would seem more reasonable to think of a good 
God as abhorring suffering in men as he abhors 
sin, and actually working with man always for joy 
as he does for righteousness. 

It is clearly necessary for the religious man to 
regard a personal God in two aspects — as taking 
the responsibility of omnipotence for everything 
that takes place, and as, at the same time, exercis- 
ing a preference and governing all things for the 
advantage of what he prefers. For example, the 
monotheist must regard sin as within God's will 
for the world ; and if he be also a moralist he must 
also believe that God prefers righteousness, and 
ordains all things for the advantage of his prefer- 
ence. 

io8 



CHAP. Ill THE USE OF PAIN 109 

In other words, there is an aspect in which we 
must beHeve, if we beheve in an almighty God, 
that he is responsible for every sin and folly in 
creation; that, having an end in view which is 
worth the price to be paid in sin and folly, he has 
counted the cost and pays the price. In that same 
sense pain and misery must, of course, be laid 
directly at God's door. A father sending his son 
into the school playground knows that many a cut 
and bruise will befall him — a broken bone, perhaps, 
or an infectious disease. The end in view is worth 
the risk. But it would involve a very different 
kind of father to give the child intentionally a cut 
or bruise, or break one of his bones, or infect him 
with a disease, and very much the kind of father 
who would lead his son into vice. Looking back, 
we find that it is a mere matter of history that the 
nations who have affirmed God's willingness to 
risk sin and denied his more direct will to bring it 
about, have progressed, and the nations that have 
not made that distinction have passed away or are 
awaiting some new impulse of life. It behooves us, 
then, to consider whether further progress does 
not depend upon recognising God as the author 
only of delight as he is the author only of righteous- 
ness. Familiarity has led the modern religious 
mind to assume an extraordinary discrepancy in 
God's ways, to suppose that, while sin in man is 
not of God but purely evil, pain, though the 
consequence of sin, is God's will, and therefore 
purely good. The belief that God can suiter but 
cannot sin is not enough to justify this.^ 

* See Appendix A, 



no THE FATHER'S HOUSE book n 

We are faced with the need for a new move- 
ment forward : the temporary resting-place which 
the rehgious mind gained by shutting off moral 
evil only as contrary to the will of God is ours no 
longer; moral and physical evil merge indis- 
tinguishably into one another, and contradiction 
must enter into our conception of God's character 
as long as the religious mind makes him directly 
responsible for the latter and not for the former. 
In the sense in which God is responsible for moral 
evil he is responsible for physical evil, and surely 
in no other sense. 

There are pressing reasons for rejecting the 
idea that salvation comes by pain. We have seen 
that the average Jew had learned to think, before 
Jesus came, that God could do no wrong. Sadly 
enough, the definiteness with which he believed 
God to be always right depended upon his ability 
to approve of the cruel judgments which his sacred 
books attributed to God. (This is seen in the 
varying outlooks of the authors of the latest books 
of the Old Testament and the Apocryphal and 
Apocalyptic literature.) Now here we see the 
causal connection between attributing to God the 
authorship of man's afflictions and supposing that 
cruelty is at times a virtue. Why should we 
return good for evil if God by direct intention 
returns evil for evil .? Why should we deal out to 
men only generosity and gentleness if God wields 
the rod even in training his most obedient 
children ? The theologian is apt to fancy that it 
is possible to say that such a line of conduct is 
right for God but not for us; but it is mere 



CHAP. Ill THE USE OF PAIN in 

matter of history that the religious man can never 
practically say, "Vengeance is for God but not for 
me." Jesus knew what was in man far better 
when he urged a life of perfect gentleness and 
unending generosity, by the argument that it was 
God's perfection to bless the evil as well as the 
good, and by the example of his own miracles, 
which exemplified the doctrine. The effort to 
copy God's perfection is of the essence of religion; 
this desire to copy God is therefore quite irre- 
sistible to the religious man. When he believes 
that God wields the rod, he himself also wields it, 
— in religious controversy, in civic and national 
relations; and in so doing he fights with the 
weapons of the enemy, and becomes a futile agent, 
like a mad soldier striking wildly, now at the 
enemy, now at his own leader. 

As men believe God to be, so they are. As 
long as the Hebrew believed in a national God 
his charity had national limits. It was not until 
the thinkers of the Roman hierarchy had arrived 
at the idea that salvation could be had beyond 
their own communion that their finer charity went 
out to men of other religions. As a matter of 
everyday fact, no good man who dwells upon 
"God's use of the rod," and kindred forms of 
religious phraseology, carries forgiveness to his 
enemies or opponents very far. Long before the 
"seventy times seven" is reached he lends himself 
as an instrument to what he supposes to be the 
divine wrath. The radical cause of this is 
indicated by the fact that when the enmity is not 
personal his anger is more unchecked ; forgiveness. 



112 THE FATHER'S HOUSE book n 

even in the first place, is not essayed because the 
anger is supposed to be on behalf of God; an 
attitude virtually insolent is at once almost un- 
consciously assumed tov^ard those thought to be 
living in error. That many humble souls of finest 
fibre rise above this coarseness of vision is due to 
that continual florescence of a divine principle 
which v^e recognise in the words, "His heart is 
better than his creed;" but that the average 
Christian indulges himself in rancour and ill-temper 
under cover of what he believes to be the punitive 
disposition of Providence is attested by the re- 
ligious polemics of Christendom. 

If we turn to consider the development accord- 
ing to experience of human theories of govern- 
ment, we cannot but perceive that a very important 
change has been going on. Man has long and 
universally tried to abolish crime by the most 
severe penalties; and it is only after ages of legal 
experiment that he has been convinced that what 
appears to him the proper result of legal experiment 
is not its result. Experience shows that the only 
real deterrent is a higher moral standard ; and the 
sort of fear that terrorism produces is certainly 
not moral fear. When the psalmist said to God, 
*' There is forgiveness with thee that thou mayest 
be feared," he expressed a very deep psychological 
law. If, then, we see that man in his attempts 
to govern his fellow-man has made a universal 
mistake, which was indeed hardly suspected till 
yesterday,^ we shall be prepared to admit that his 

^ See the reflection of popular opinion in the speech of King 
Edward VII, in opening the new Central Criminal Court, Lon- 



CHAP. Ill THE USE OF PAIN 113 

fallacious notions of human discipline may have 
given him a fallacious notion of the divine meth- 
ods; in v^hich case v^e must alter our concep- 
tion of the divine plan of government heretofore 
supposed to be exhibited in such cases as the death 
of Ananias and Sapphira, St. Paul's thorn in the 
flesh, the destruction of Jerusalem, and the 
innumerable misfortunes and diseases v^^hich for 
tvs^o thousand years Christians have attributed to 
the v^ill of God. 

There is nov^ a large consensus of moral opinion 
in favour of the view that legal penalties are 
justified only in so far as they aim at the benefit 
of the criminal, and that only by reforming the 
criminal can society be adequately protected. 
This stage in civic development corresponds to 
the religious stage at v^hich the idea of expiating 
guilt by physical suffering is perceived to be 
fallacious. The next belief of statesmen and 
theologians appears to be that the infliction of 
penalties by v^ay of discipline is desirable. And 
yet the reflective are av^are that this is no logical 
resting-place, that just in so far as penalties are 
merely distressful to the criminal they fail to infect 
him v^ith that love for mankind v^hich is the only 
root of good behaviour. It is not pain that lifts 
him, but other elements in punishment. We 
dimly feel, even v^ith regard to the most degraded 

don: "The barbarous penal code which was deemed necessary 
a hundred years ago has gradually been replaced, in the progress 
toward a higher civilisation, by laws breathing a more humane 
spirit and aiming at a nobler purpose. ... I look with con- 
fidence to those who will administer justice in this building to 
have continued regard to the hope of reform in the criminal." 



114 THE FATHER'S HOUSE book n 

criminal, that just as brutal punishments would 
brutalise him further, so there is no infliction that 
tends to his advancement; that as love is the only 
force that inexorably compels to the highest 
ethical achievement, so love is the only force that 
can illuminate the lowest ethical depths. We 
perceive, even in the matter of parental discipline, 
that to talk of inflicting distress as a form of love 
is in reality a confusion of thought, because 
punitive discipline at best is the use of an inferior 
instrument, implying a lack of resource in the 
parent or state that wields it. It is not a form 
of love, but a form of expediency; it is not 
the expression of power, but the expression of 
impotence. The most that can truly be ""said for 
force used either in punishment or war is that 
we find it necessary. Because we, even while 
experiencing sentiments of affection, are still some- 
times harassed by our limitations into the use of 
an inferior method, are we therefore justified in 
continuing to attribute to God what we know to 
be an inferior method ^ If the change that has 
come over the civilised mind in the treatment of 
criminals and children is a real reformation and 
advance, it must be reflected in our ideas of God's 
treatment of us, unless theology is to fall behind, 
only to find its reformation by a long battle of 
doubtful issue with sects which will vindicate 
God's character in ways more or less partial and 
extreme. 

Therefore, since moral progress seems to be 
along the line of dissociating the thought of suf- 
fering from the thought of true purgation, and 



CHAP. Ill THE USE OF PAIN 115 

so from the thought of God's will, the fact that 
many of us are so constituted as naturally to think 
suffering salutary to the moral nature is no con- 
clusive argument for it, because historically we 
have seen that many convictions have held the 
race until experience disproved them in most 
unexpected ways. 

There are two great powers that rule us, pain 
and joy, and the greater of these is joy. But 
humanity in one stage of its progress deeply 
believes that pain is the greater. This belief has 
by the storm and stress of the past been woven 
into those tendencies of thought that we call 
instinctive. We try to rule ourselves by pain; 
we try to rule others by pain; the Church has 
chiefly tried to guide men by insisting on the 
power of pain. We go back to the records 
of the gospel, and find that the Christ preached 
joy, put forward joy, as the chief factor in the 
redemption of the world. We cannot at once 
analyse what this means, because we have believed 
God to be the volitional source of our pain. 
The supreme moral reason for rejecting this old 
belief is that it has robbed the gospel of the joy 
with which Jesus invested it. Religion is not now 
the source of much joy. What Christian man is 
there amongst us who does not rejoice more in a 
medical consulting-room when told that he can be 
cured of his disease, or in his lawyer's office when 
told that he is heir to thousands, or in the pres- 
ence of the woman he loves when his hand is ac- 
cepted in marriage, than when he understands that 
wisdom to know and take the right course, to his 



ii6 THE FATHER'S HOUSE book n 

worldly detriment, will be given him in a difficulty ? 
Indeed, how many are there among us who would 
not rather hear of any success of his children in 
the competition of life, of any rise in the stocks in 
which he has invested, of any local victory of his 
political party, than hear that a heathen province 
has put on Christ ? It may be true that thousands 
who feel quite naturally and simply that the chief 
joys of life lie in matters unconnected with the 
Christian hope would still rather relinquish all 
else than that hope. "All that a man has will he 
give for his life;" even, and chiefly, when that 
life is one long grumble; and a Christian man 
may esteem the faithfulness of Christ the first 
necessity of life without having any faith that is 
better than a grumble. Joy, with its dynamic 
force, has gone out of our religion, whose total 
force is thereby greatly diminished. We cannot 
even conceive of the extent of our lack, because 
what God would give to a fuller faith is beyond 
human conception. 

The Church would be transfigured if she could, 
by a corporate faith, stand upon the mount of 
God, and see him working here and now only for 
the delight and joy of all his creatures. With new 
dignity, which would invest her with raiment white 
and glistering, she would then with authority teach 
that man must love God with all his powers and 
his neighbour as himself, and make no compromise 
with the lower life of self or party interest. It is 
open to every man to accept Adam's curse, to 
sweat for mere bread, to set before himself material 
pleasures as an end: it is within his power, by 



CHAP. Ill THE USE OF PAIN 117 

giving his chief effort to it, to create material 
gains, to make bread even out of stones; again, it 
is open to every man to live for personal ambition, 
to live for the sake of possessing the kingdoms of 
this w^orld, however small or large his v^orld may 
be — a life so given is the worship of the prince of 
the world. Or it is open to every man to attempt 
an ascetic religion in defiance of the law that 
body conditions soul, to attempt to transcend the 
physical conditions of spiritual life under which 
God has placed him; by so doing he will attain 
to some eminence, some temple minaret, and fall 
therefrom. 

There will alv/ays be some extreme hour for 
the true Christian when he will passionately pray 
that the renunciation of self-interest so terrible to 
him, and necessarily so painful to God, may in 
some way be avoided without dishonour. No 
man in the midst of the world can ever be assured 
that, in the complex working of human hearts, it 
may not be open to God to give a happy issue out 
of menacing afflictions; yet — this is what all the 
prophets have spoken — every true seer in the long 
search of the race for God has said clearly that 
when God does not make a way, man must make 
none by compromise with the spirit of self-interest, 
by withdrawing from the warfare. If an earthly 
king, being evil, desires for every soldier under 
his banners a painless and honourable path to the 
joy of victory, how much more God ! Yet as the 
most tender human heart will desire for its dearest, 
peace only with honour, victory at whatever cost, 
so must God. 



ii8 THE FATHER'S HOUSE book n 

It will be said that the difference is recondite; 
that if exhaustion and wounds and death are God's 
will for the Christian in the same sense as they are 
the will of a king for his soldiers; as long as there 
must be in the crisis the clash between God's 
desire and his servant's — as to time and method 
if not as to end — the distinction between God's 
infliction of suffering and his preference of suffer- 
ing to moral defeat matters nothing. 

Just so the ancient Israelite, as we see from his 
literature, regarded as recondite the question 
whether God was the author of all thought, will, 
and spiritual activity — of fury as of love, of guile 
as of truth — or only the author of good. Yet the 
recognition of the difference marked the parting 
of the w^ays for progress or decadence ; for man's 
definition of God's character is his faith. We see 
that just in so far as any ancient race found God 
to be antagonistic to moral evil they rose above 
all adversity, and reigned by giving laws to their 
conquerors and ethical ideals to the future. 

It is, therefore, not difficult to believe that, if 
we accept the teaching of Christ that God seeks to 
save all men from suffering as from sin, we shall 
rise again in the scale. The war against all suffer- 
ing will become as sacred as the war against sin. 
While in the whole earth any man suffers wrong 
from his fellows, or languishes for lack of scientific 
light and human love and Christ's salvation, the 
idea of planning life to attain personal fortune or 
honour or excellence will be felt incompatible 
with the Christian profession. 



CHAPTER IV 

FATALISM AND ASCETICISM 

The following considerations will go to show that 
the fatalistic belief that all suffering is God's will 
is not only a relic of a past and lower stage of 
thought, which indeed was brought to greatest 
perfection in the fatalism of the Hindoo and the 
Mahommedan, but that while we hold it we 
cannot have the best inspiration that Christianity 
can give; further, that the desire to suffer is not 
necessary to resignation, nor is asceticism necessary 
to the discipline of effort. 

The following quotations from modern writers 
give what we all recognise as the common notions 
of Christendom concerning God's dealing with men. 

"All the manifold trials with which God visits 
us are with a view to this perfect purification of 
the soul. Such trials are needful — for in no other 
way can we cast aside self; but they are hard to 
bear — unbearable, indeed, unless we give ourselves 
up passively to God, who will sustain us. Such 
trials are more profitable to God's glory and the 
soul's salvation than the longest life of good works 
and religious exercises. " ^ 

^ From The Hidden Life of the Soul, adapted from the French 
of Jean Nicolas Grou. 

119 



120 THE FATHER'S HOUSE book n 

"Let the afflictions I meet with be in some 
measure serviceable toward the appeasing of thy 
wrath." ^ 

"I know, O my God, Thou sendest this sick- 
ness on me for my good, even to humble and 
reform me; O grant it may work that saving 
effect in me." ^ 

"When thou findest thyself visited with sick- 
ness ... let thy first care be, to find out what 
it is that provokes him to smite thee."^ 

"Whatever your sickness is, know you cer- 
tainly that it is God's visitation." ^ 

This teaching represents the forces of God as 
warring among themselves. Any young man 
setting forth on a career of sport or athletics or 
on some warlike expedition or scientific quest, has 
a mind cheerfully attuned to the inevitable hard- 
ships of his course. If his aim be scientifix truth 
he does not think of truth as making his way 
arduous, or as being any the truer when attained 
because of the pains of attainment; nor does a 
man think of his wounds in warfare as inflicted by 
the king he serves. Considering the difficulties 
only as obstacles to be overcome, his attention is 
not diverted or his force diminished by them. 
Obstacles, as obstacles, are for the purpose in 
hand purely evil; and to regard them thus is 
necessary to the condition of mind typified by the 
single eye, and necessary to the attainment of 

■^ Bishop Wilson, Sacra Privata, p. 64. 
^ Bishop Ken, Manual (for Winchester boys), p. 120. 
^ Whole Duty of Man (17th century), p. 447. 
* Exhortation to the Sick, Book of Common Prayer. 



CH. IV FATALISM AND ASCETICISM 121 

success, earthly or heavenly. Consider how the 
force of a young warrior would be diminished in 
the service of a king if he regarded all the trials 
and misfortunes of his march and warfare as of 
his king's planning or infliction. Consider how 
doubtful a man would be of the advantage of 
reaching scientific truth if he could personify 
knowledge, and conceive her as guarding all 
approach to her glorious precincts with a rod. 
To most men an underlying inconsistency in 
religious thought is the great deterrent, although 
they may be unaware of the cause of repulsion. 
The enthusiast easily leaps over it; the criminal is 
sunk below any perception of it; but for the 
mass of men, although the sense of inconsistency 
is usually quite inarticulate, its baneful effect is 
none the less there. It is when the deep under- 
lying uneasiness finds words of protest that men 
begin to struggle out from under the burden, and 
their activities are set free even though their minds 
are not able to cope adequately with the problem — 
as, for instance, in the notable case of "Christian 
cience. 
So much emphasis has been laid on suffering as 
a chief part of the "good news" of God as set 
forth by "orthodoxy," that the message has little 
attraction for the happy. Within the very limited 
power of expression given to any human artist he 
has the choice of two ways by which to make light 
in his picture — by giving greater radiance to the 

^ The writer has no first-hand acquaintance with "Christian 
Science," and has seen only portions of its Hterature. See Ap- 
pendix B. 



122 THE FATHER'S HOUSE book n 

lighter parts, or by intensifying the shadow. If 
the shadows are made dark enough, a compara- 
tively muddy and dingy colour can, by contrast with 
them, be made to appear high light. This is very 
much the way in which Christendom, in many times 
and places, has endeavoured to set forth the attrac- 
tions of the gospel. What has been preached has 
not been a doctrine which the plain man would 
recognise in his everyday life as the "good news" 
of God; the effort to convert him to the belief 
that it is "good news" has too often taken the 
form of blackening the evil fate from which it 
offers an escape. God's providence, the judg- 
ment, and the hereafter, have been painted with a 
brush dipped in a darkness which made itself felt. 
Against this tendency there has always been the 
quiet influence of our Lord's words, "If ye then, 
being evil, know how ye would deal with your 
children, how much better a father must God be 
to you than you are to them." This leaven of 
the: kingdom has always worked, giving happier 
views of God's providence in this world and the 
next. A large response to these happier views in 
the heart of the common man to-day, vague and 
incoherent enough in itself, has undoubtedly 
sufficed to turn him from Christianity as it is 
commonly taught. 

Does the fault lie with -the men who thus turn 
from the Church .? The depth of a man's character 
and his mental grasp may be measured by the 
strength of his conviction that he is evil, but not 
by the belief that God will administer grief to 
him. The first conviction is based on the failure 



CH. IV FATALISM AND ASCETICISM 123 

that attends his efforts to be good. What spoils 
his success in being good he calls evil. The loftier 
his ideal of good, the more earnest his desire to 
attain it, the more clearly he sees that evil is 
present with him; the remembrance of it in his 
past is grievous; its present tyranny seems in- 
tolerable. This is a rational attitude toward a 
fact of which he has some knowledge. On the 
other hand, it is only by faith that he can see 
God; his belief concerning God's attitude toward 
the evil in human nature must be only an inference 
based on his faith about God; and to believe in 
God's fatherhood and attribute to him actions 
toward man in this life which we should call cruel 
in a father does not appear to argue depth of 
feeling or clearness of thought. Man's only hope 
of happiness in the next life rests upon God's 
character; if God's will for him in this life is 
direful, hope is inconsistent. 

If the gospel of Christ does not offer to the 
common, happy man in the common, happy street 
something that arouses his desire as soon as his 
attention is fixed upon it, it cannot rightly be 
called "the good news of God." Evil thoughts 
may quickly dissipate the im.pression; the cares 
either of poverty or riches may choke it; his own 
lack of persistence in desiring anything may wither 
this desire; yet if it be good news indeed it must 
attract him naturally and simply, without any 
dogmatist at his elbow to change the aspect of his 
past and future life, of earth and hell and heaven, 
before he recognises it as good. It is the goodness 
of the news that must itself work the required 



124 THE FATHER^S HOUSE book n 

change in him. He who, having heard of some- 
thing he wants more than anything he has, 
rehnquishes his evil thoughts, his worldly ideas, or 
overcomes his own shallowness, sufficiently to make 
it his own, must make many discoveries as to the 
inner nature of sin and self. The good fruit, 
indeed, which is the result of his reception of the 
news can only be borne at the expense of his sins, 
by choking them at the root, a process which is 
accompanied by a new knowledge of sin and 
righteousness and judgment. 

But at the first hearing the heart of the common 
man, however indifferent to all things classed as 
"religious," will answer to the delight of "good 
news"; and the reason that he is, and has been, 
so largely left without the gospel of Christ is that 
what appears bright against the violent shadows 
of the theologian is not bright in contrast to the 
common sunshine of daily life. But even the 
theologians begin to mistrust the shadows; the 
common man frankly disowns them. That exal- 
tation of suffering as the way of life which was 
increasingly emphasised in the interpretation given 
to Christianity by the world of the first Christian 
centuries — an emphasis which culminated in the 
mediaeval Church and has since decreased — ^will win 
the world less and less as the conditions of life 
improve by the very practice of Christianity. 
The Pauline doctrine of chastisement emphasised in 
the cloister, and in every puritan revival, to the 
exclusion of natural joy, has laid upon the mass of 
men a burden too heavy to be borne, — the service 
of a God who wars against his ov^n armies. God 



CH. IV FATALISM AND ASCETICISM 125 

Is represented as the agent in every untoward 
accident, disabling and dismembering those who 
seek to do him the best service. What can be 
expected of men but half-hearted service to such a 
king ? Such actions on the part of God required 
explanation, and all the sophistries of which 
theology is capable have been required to explain 
that God was indeed doing better for them in this 
way than if his kingdom did not appear to be 
divided against itself. 

This explanation can only satisfy three classes; 
first, those who, having hold of God's hand by the 
direct simplicity and purity of their character, 
receive direct from him a higher truth, so word- 
less that it does not conflict with the letter of any 
doctrine or concern itself with the letter of any; 
secondly, those who are prepared to set aside the 
whole physical aspect of hfe, and live in an 
imaginative world that they think to be purely 
spiritual; or thirdly, the large class of mind whose 
mental (not physical) indolence and pious sentiment 
finds its easiest outlet in fatalism. 

The reason why fatalism is often credited with 
a high character is because people attribute to it 
the courage and patience and resolute activities of 
the fatalist. That these are often dauntless is due 
rather to the fact that fatalism numbs all reasonable 
doubt, lifts religion into an unpractical sphere, and 
sets man's activities free from the embarrassment 
of scruple, as we see them for the most part free 
in healthy childhood or unreflecting youth. What 
reflection the fatalist does exercise is restful rather 
than a drain upon his other activities of thought 



126 THE FATHER'S HOUSE 



: J! 



and body. He is naturally more successful in his 
enterprise, or more patient under failure, than any 
man who is trying to reconcile an active reason with 
the inconsistencies of a religion which he believes 
ought to be the motive and guide of every activity. 
Nor is it necessary to believe that all suffering 
is of God's direct intention in order to exalt the 
great virtue of resignation. A man's fidelity to 
God must be measured by his resignation to the 
divine will in all things which conflict with his 
own desire while they belong to God's scheme for 
the building up of free virtue, just as he resigns 
himself to the pains, privations, and fatigues of a 
hard enterprise which he must pursue; but a 
man's fidelity to God is not measured by resignation 
to evil that conflicts both with his own desire and 
also with God's will. If, for example, all the sick 
folk mentioned in the Gospels had resigned them- 
selves to their condition, had not clamoured for 
the attention of Jesus, impeding his progress and 
interrupting his teaching, Christians believe that 
God's work would have been checked, the kingdom 
retarded, not advanced. If, on the other hand, 
every Christian throughout the ages, claiming the 
gifts God offers to faith, had resigned himself to 
that degree of wordly failure which uncompromis- 
ing^ obedience to the ideal of Christ must involve, 
the salt of the earth would not, so far, have lost its 
saltness. "The devil" is probably a fatalist; he 
certainly will advance his kingdom furthest by 
persuading the saints to acquiesce in what is not 
God's will, thus making them feel incapable of 
doing what is. 



CH. IV FATALISM AND ASCETICISM 127 

The man who can regard God as Hving apart 
in the region of necessity or fate; the man who 
can regard this earth Hfe as a factor which can be 
set aside as almost neghgible in his estimate of 
existence; the man who sees God face to face, and 
needs no reasonable account of the divine love — 
these may thrive upon any doctrine of divine 
providence. But they are few among the masses 
whom Jesus came to save; and from under this 
horrid incubus — the idea of a God who is for ever 
afflicting those he loves best — we see the modern 
spirit struggling out in several directions. There 
is the great protest of pure materialism, "Better 
no God than one who is worse than an earthly 
father"; and this sets free natural activities which 
perhaps are upborne by the divine mind more truly 
than are the austerities of the enthusiast. There 
is the great protest of agnosticism, "Better an 
unknown God than one inconsistent with reason." 
And this again sets free in the best men activities 
of speculation and worship which are, perhaps, 
emboldened by the vital force from the divine 
heart as any theology coarsened by the world's 
applause can never be. And there is the recent 
doctrine of ," Christian Science," a mad philosophy 
but apparently a true worship, honouring certain 
abstractions from the Christian idea, which are 
false only because they are abstractions, and have 
been abstracted from the concrete Christian faith 
because a large part of the Church had previously 
contented herself with other abstractions more false 
and vain. 

Further, to maintain that suffering has been 



128 THE FATHER'S HOUSE book n 

exalted in religious thought to a false honour is 
not to deny that pain, disappointment, and con- 
tradiction are the only field in which we know 
effort, and that the discipline of effort is salutary 
in the moral as in the physical life. Every young 
animal, in order to satisfy its hunger and thirst, 
its curiosity and inborn activity, will clamber 
painfully over the most difficult obstacles to attain 
something it has in view; its falls, its quarrels 
with its fellows, the disappointment of not reaching 
what has attracted it, or finding it when reached, 
less desirable than appeared — these are the evil 
sufficient for the day which makes it more sturdy 
and more wise on the morrow. The child that is 
not seeking to do something a little beyond its 
strength and wit, falling and failing, disputing 
with men and circumstances its right to success, is 
not — at six months or at twenty years — a growing 
child; and furthermore, is not a happy child. 
And when, after threescore years and ten, he 
begins to cease all effort and turn aside from all 
discussion, we sadly say, "He is ageing fast;" 
and life is practically over as soon as the effort to 
reach what is beyond reach, with the pains and 
disappointments and contradictions necessary to 
effort and uncertainty, have ceased. What we 
need most carefully to mark is that with the 
cessation of effort comes the cessation of joy. 
This knowledge, that the discipline of effort is the 
law of life as we know it, affects our idea of all 
delight as much as our idea of pain, our idea of 
heaven as well as of hell. We look forward in 
another life, not to rest but to less friction, not to 



CH. IV FATALISM AND ASCETICISM 129 

any joy in the feeling that there are no new worlds 
to conquer, but to the joy of eternal conquest; 
and the ideas of power without expenditure, of 
movement without friction, are not now possible 
to our reasoning powers, so that we regard the 
discipline which attends effort as quite as much 
necessary for delight as for development. 

Many place a high value upon what they think 
to be asceticism without taking pains to distinguish 
it from other principles of action. To choose any 
course which involves hardship and self-denial for 
the sake of accomplishing some end which is 
counted worth the cost, is not asceticism unless, 
when the end is the development of a man's own 
character, the hardship chosen be some form of 
discipline which will keep the body in subjection. 

For example, he who, for the sake of supporting 
some relative, or in order to obtain a position, or 
to be able to marry, chooses a meagre and toilsome 
life, is not an ascetic. Neither is he an ascetic if 
he choose the same life in the missionary spirit, 
for the sake of bestowing spiritual wealth upon 
others. A man who sells all he has to buy a pearl 
or a field, or to further the interests of a kingdom 
that claims his loyalty, is not an ascetic. 

If, however, the man who sold all he had for 
the sake of gaining something he desired more, 
should think that the poverty or inconvenience 
that he suffered was to be courted for the sake of 
enhancing his own fitness to receive the treasure, 
or because such suffering was pleasing to some 
invisible power, the element of asceticism would 
enter into what he did. A man who gives up 

K 



130 THE FATHER'S HOUSE book n 

eating meat one day in the week because he thinks, 
or those he chooses to obey think, that his body 
will thereby become stronger, and on the whole, 
more healthy and therefore more useful to himself 
and to God, is not an ascetic. But if he fast on 
Friday, believing that physical inconvenience is the 
best method of bringing his body into subjection 
to his will and so making it more useful to himself 
and to God, he is an ascetic. Asceticism lies in 
the belief that there is some moral advantage to 
be gained by the mere endurance of suffering, and 
in the habit of courting for that end suffering 
which has no other end. Two men may act in 
precisely the same way, one an ascetic, the other a 
free man of the kingdom of Christ. The difference 
does not depend on whether a man consider a 
moral advantage worth purchasing at the cost of a 
physical disadvantage; but on whether he consider 
the courting of physical disadvantage the true way 
to gain moral advantage. 

There can surely be no doubt that Jesus taught 
that his followers must choose all the self-denial 
and loss that is involved for any man in making 
the kingdom of heaven, its interests and its 
benefits, the first object of desire and effort. The 
end for each man is union with God; the means 
to that end is union with man. The kingdom 
was the aggregate of those who lived by this means 
to this end. But the joy of the end and the 
joy of the means was to swallow up all incidental 
loss and pain. We are all familiar with that de- 
scription of the life of Jesus, "who for the joy that 
was set before him endured the cross, despising 



CH. IV FATALISM AND ASCETICISM 131 

the shame." The spirit in these words is very 
different from the spirit that courts pain and 
shame for the private benefit of character. In the 
parables of the kingdom, in the precepts concern- 
ing hfe in the kingdom, what is given or done to 
obtain the end in view is incidental, and the mind, 
fixed on the joy of its motive, is filled with images 
of gain and gladness rather than with images of 
privation and pain. The glow of enterprise, the 
flush of effort, the buoyancy of hope, and the 
strenuous faith which grasps the substance hoped 
for and tastes the delight of what is as yet unseen, 
all combine to build up the moral character of the 
child of the kingdom. It is true that he also 
gains all the moral benefit that loss can give; but, 
instead of seeking loss, he spurns with the sole of 
his foot each hardship by which he rises. We can 
see him on his mountain path, footsore, climbing 
up from crag to crag; the sharp rocks are his 
natural sorrows; the sweet air he breathes, the 
sweet fruits on which he feeds, are his simple 
earthly goods, and are as essential to his progress 
as the rough road on which he treads. But his 
m.ind, in harmony with his heavenly calling, dwells 
on the beauty and comforts of the pathway 
because they are the direct gifts of his God whose 
love lures him on. He has no need to seek to 
wound his feet; inspired by God, he takes the 
quickest path, however rough, and hardly under- 
stands that the blood upon the pathway is 
his own. 



CHAPTER V 

PROPHETS AND APOSTLES 

We may, by analogy, briefly outline the change 
that has come over the minds of Christian thinkers 
with regard to the authority of the lawgivers and 
prophets of Israel, and also of the apostles. 

It is not uncommon for young children to be 
trained, by precept of mother and nurse, to regard 
their father as an infallible authority and example. 
Sturdy intelligent boys, pushing beyond the nursery, 
are bound to perceive that their ideals of justice, 
mercy, and common sense do not always tally with 
the parental word and character. Here the father 
said something that was not quite accurate, there 
he showed temper; and such instances, even if 
exceptional, are remembered when the father's 
discipline is not to their taste. The first workings 
of such observations do not, in fact cannot, over- 
throw the dogma of the father's infallibility so 
early, and perhaps wisely, implanted. The result 
is rebellion against the infallible standard. Anarchy 
reigns in the heart of the son, and in many a case 
carries him beyond the influence of the domestic 
circle into a world where, without guiding principle, 

1^2 



CHAP. V PROPHETS AND APOSTLES 133 

he too often loses his way. But, perhaps in many 
more cases, what happens is this : growing older, 
going to school and returning, the boy forgets 
the nursery dogma; his father appears to him as 
a man among men; then how gladly does he 
recognise all that is good in his father's heart, 
all that is wise in his judgment, all that is true in 
his principles ! We cannot stay here to inquire 
how a boy obtains a standard by which to judge 
what in his father is worthy of imitation and what 
is not; it remains a fact that he does judge. 
A boy may make mistakes, but the moral sense 
within and the common sense of the community 
without, make such judgment inevitable to a 
growing intellect. The father now has a deeper 
influence over the growing man than he could ever 
have had if seen in a false light, even had the son 
rendered unreasoning obedience all his life, because 
the father's influence now extends beyond action 
and mechanical thought to the springs of spon- 
taneous thought and action. 

Such is, in some sort, now the influence which 
the lives and opinions of prophets and apostles 
have over the thinking Christian, who says that 
the Old Testament is not so much an inspired 
record as a wonderfully candid record of the lives, 
the opinions, and the worship, of men inspired by 
that hunger and thirst for righteousness which 
cannot fail of its desire, and with that purity of 
heart which sees God. Their age was not infallible, 
and they were men of their age. The same must 
be said of the writers of the Gospels and Epistles ; 
the test of the quality of their inspiration is the 



134 THE FATHER'S HOUSE book n 

higher hfe and higher faith which they actually did 
implant in the world. 

Why, then, do we believe in the infallibility of 
Jesus ? The assurance of that central Christian 
faith rests upon the intuitive knowledge which his 
servants daily have of him, and which is incom- 
municable by argument. It is like the oil in the 
lamp of the wedding guest, which cannot be 
transferred to the lamp which another carries, and 
can only be known to others by its light. We 
cannot too clearly bear in mind that all on the 
side of reason that is essential to the intuitive faith 
of any Christian is that his own reason should not 
contradict it; so that all strife of tongues concern- 
ing Christian dogmas are, beyond that, irrelevant 
to the central Christian belief. At the same time 
this intuitive knowledge can be buttressed by any 
argument that seems reasonable to its possessor. 
If the possessor be a well-informed and thinking 
person, what appears reasonable to him will have 
a certain force with other thinking persons; and 
with regard to the different position which Jesus 
occupies in religious history compared with pro- 
phets and apostles, we would note two lines of 
thought and research which commend themselves. 

The first is that, taking the world over and the 
length of ages, all that we find of new life, new 
thought, and new impulse in the early Christian 
Church must be set down to a new cause, and in 
so far as it corresponds with the life of Jesus told 
in the Gospels it is only reasonable to regard his 
inspiration as the cause. It is almost superfluous 
now to remark that the religious thought and 



CHAP. V PROPHETS AND APOSTLES 135 

moral activities of the Gentile nations were, in the 
ancient world, and are now, on a much higher 
plane than Christian apologists used to suppose; 
but granting all of good that can be ascribed to 
them and to the pious Jews of the Christian era, 
there is in the early Church, and in its effect upon 
its environment, evidence of an impulse of joyful 
love and a new estimate of God which can be 
most reasonably accounted for by assuming the 
substantial truth of the Gospel record. Joy was 
the most novel feature of the new faith; no 
adequate cause but the truth of the Gospel story 
can be assumed for it. 

The second consideration which makes it the 
more reasonable to regard Jesus as holding some 
unique place among mystics, among lawgivers, 
among poets, and among practical reformers, as 
having an inspiration which raised him above his 
fellow-men in all these capacities, is that disciples, 
obviously incapable of understanding all that 
they transmitted, of grasping more than a small 
part of the force of what they transmitted, did 
none the less transmit it in a form such that every 
progressive generation has been able to assimilate 
from that form more and more of what is godlike. 
To-day we find in the life of Jesus truths which 
prove to be the solution of national and social 
problems, and of the problems of every individual 
heart. To say this is not to assert that the theology 
of the Christian Church at any one period solves 
these problems, still less that the conception of 
Christianity in the minds of those who reject it is 
a conception that helps to such solution. Christian 



136 THE FATHER'S HOUSE book n 

theology in every age has stood to the message 
of Jesus as the partial conceptions of the first 
disciples stood to it. The great Christian miracle 
is that through this shifting but perennial mis- 
conception a Christ is still seen, is, as we believe 
the progress of the v^orld proves, increasingly 
understood, and can be grasped by faith which in 
operation accomplishes the highest human ends. 
This is a strong argument for a belief that does 
not rest on argument. 

But to return to the question of the relative 
positions of Jesus and other teachers whose words 
are recorded in Scripture. It seems, indeed, extra- 
ordinary that the Church for many centuries has 
taught that Jesus was "very God of very God," 
and yet held that his life and words did not hold 
the mirror to the character of God the Father 
more clearly than did the lives and words of his 
own followers. We have now a theoretical know- 
ledge of this mistake; we need to have the 
application of this knowledge enforced. We are 
still slothfully holding hard to many conclusions 
arrived at by arguments of which the equal in- 
spiration of all Scripture was the major premiss. 
The premiss is lost; we have not revised our 
conclusions. 

The inspiration of a nation is seen in its life, 
in its gallant struggle to know God and to do 
righteousness : the inspiration of an apostle is 
shown in the calibre of his missionary life, and in 
the life he implants in others. If we w^ere to 
refuse to be content until the nation we represent 
sought God as impetuously as did Israel under 



CHAP. V PROPHETS AND APOSTLES 137 

divine inspiration, until the inspiration of the 
Apostles was imparted to us as individuals and our 
lives bore the same abundant fruits, we should no 
longer be in danger of confusing the inspiration of 
the Master v^ith that of some of his disciples; and 
should avoid the confusions of thought which have 
arisen out of the belief that the doctrine of Jesus 
must be modified and corrected until it correspond 
with the interpretation of his forerunners and 
followers. 

If we examine the way in which Jesus treated 
the prestige of the prophets and lawgivers of the 
Old Testament we shall see that we have his own 
authority for allowing each age to test the inspira- 
tion of sacred books by the highest developments 
of truth which the corporate mind may then grasp. 
There is plain evidence in history that every law 
or moral obligation that the race has seriously 
adopted as a way of salvation must be worked out 
with fear till its every requirement — each jot and 
tittle — has been exhaustively tested, and found 
either useful or useless in the attainment of the 
highest ends. Yet when Jesus says that the law 
shall not fail, that he himself came to fulfil the law, 
and that the law is more enduring than heaven and 
earth, it is clearly not the laws, or even the mioral 
obligations, of Semitic ceremonial and taboo, and 
the crude ethics attached to them, to which he 
refers; it is clearly the rightness of justice and 
mercy, and their eternal synthesis of love, of which 
he is speaking. 

In speaking thus of the eternal right, what did 
he mean to teach about all that mass of legal 



138 THE FATHER'S HOUSE book n 

enactments embedded in the canonical books of 
the Old Testament, which the Jews from whom he 
sprang, to whom he spoke, regarded as "the law" ? 
If we read those long passages in the Pentateuch 
which deal with the details of the clean and unclean 
— regulations which were not of the Jahveh reli- 
gion, but had come down from Semitic fathers of 
the dim animistic past, like circumcision, which our 
Lord himself says was not of Moses — we must 
see that Jesus could have had no thought of set- 
ting the seal of his authority upon all this. It 
seems clear that he would teach that a o-reat 
part of the books of the Old Testament were 
negligible, so certain to pass away in the hearts 
and minds of those who entered into life through 
his life that no argument concerning them was 
necessary. 

If the Christian Church, by upholding the 
authority of all the canonical scriptures, has deter- 
minedly put a new patch on an old garment, the 
ever-increasino; rent cannot be charged to lesus. 
He who would not in his lifetime pay heed to 
ceremonial rules which clashed with any need of 
human life, who even neglected useless ceremony 
when no need required the neglect, could not have 
regarded pages devoted to such regulations as 
having ever been of divine inspiration. How 
gentle was his protestantism ! He admits that the 
new doctrine must be a store for the future, like 
new wine hung up in new wine-skins to gain 
value by time ; his gentle excuse for the way they 
would for many generations cling to the old 
doctrine is, "No man having drunk old wine 



CHAP. V PROPHETS AND APOSTLES 139 

desireth new, for he saith, The old is good." 
"This ought ye to have done" as long as it seems 
to you to have divine authority, but not to have 
omitted the v^eightier matters of justice and mercy. 
He was confident that he who follows the guiding 
light of these virtues will soon become so absorbed 
in the aspect of the divine character which they 
unfold that he will cease to assume divine sanction 
for anything trivial or banal. 

Thus we see that the explanation of our Lord's 
attitude toward the written law was that he did 
not consider it worth while to publish destructive 
criticism of what was necessarily transitory. His 
own definite attitude toward their doctrine of the 
infallibility of their past teachers flashes out after 
a discussion with the theologians at Jerusalem, 
when they had uttered again their oft-repeated 
taunt, claiming the authority of their holy records 
against his work — "Abraham is our father." 
"We know that God spake unto Moses, as for 
this fellow we know not from whence he is." 
His reply is the parable of the false shepherds and 
the true. "All that ever came before me were 
thieves and robbers." There stand his words, 
his own explanation of the parable, as valid as 
any of the dear familiar words that follow. "I 
am the good shepherd." "I am the door." I 
alone ! It is all poetry, the expression not only 
of a wounded heart but of a glowing imagination, 
and we are forced to admit that if the passage 
teaches that in comparison with all his forerunners, 
the law and the prophets, Jesus is the one Saviour 
of his people, it also teaches that in comparison 



140 THE FATHER'S HOUSE book n 

with his authority the authority of the law and 
the prophets was as nothing. 

Again, we have set up ' the authority of his 
own disciples to modify and correct our under- 
standing of the teaching of Jesus, in spite of our 
knowledge that the greater a man is the more 
difficult it is for him to win a full understanding 
from other men. Let us begin with the case of 
a man who is somewhat superior to his fellows in 
power of thought and expression, and also in 
moral character. He knows that his differing 
aspects are understood by differing and ever- 
widening circles of people. In one aspect he 
will be best known by his brothers and sisters, 
his wife and children. Whatever is personally 
attractive in him will be dearest to the hearts of 
those nearest to him; these are they who would 
in the first place suffer most for his sake. But 
such a man is perfectly conscious that members 
of this inner circle rarely understand his thoughts : 
whatever expression he gives to them goes out 
into the world, and finds its best soil here and 
there in the minds of comparative strangers, who 
are better able to interpret his art or doctrine, or 
whatever it be, than are his nearest relatives. 
If, however, he is, as we say, "before his age," 
great enough to have grasped something which 
his generation has failed to apprehend, then, the 
more certain he is of the truth of his vision, the 
more he is assured that it must wait to win a full 
understanding from future generations. Kepler's 
great foreword, that he could well be content 
to wait for readers since God had waited so long 



CHAP. V PROPHETS AND APOSTLES 141 

for a discoverer, finds an echo in the heart of 
every one who has in any way studied the 
phenomena of human genius. 

From all this it is evident that the more we 
exalt the character and the message of Jesus 
Christ, the more we must realise that what is 
true of every man of petty distinction must have 
been true in much greater measure of him. 
To the inner circle of his disciples was revealed 
the highest degree of lovableness in human 
personality that the earth had seen. They loved, 
and that was their inspiration — so great an in- 
spiration that the whole busy world has been 
forced to gaze at their master through the 
description wrought by their personal affection. 
But these men were not so well fitted to grasp 
the message of Jesus in its depth of thought, its 
international application, and its universal hope, as 
were some of those who believed because of their 
word. Of this first outer circle St. Paul is the 
magnificent example; and that very many others 
seized on the thoughts of Jesus and were seized by 
them, is shown by the rapid spread of the Christian 
doctrine in the best forms in which that age could 
assimilate it. Their inspiration was devotion to 
the mind of Christ to the utmost extent of their 
power to understand and teach it. 

If, however, we are to believe that the inter- 
pretation of the message of Jesus given by St. 
Paul and the author of the Epistle to the 
Hebrews and other inspired writers, was an 
infallible interpretation for all time, we must 
believe, either that they were as great in spiritual 



142 THE FATHER'S HOUSE book n 

and intellectual insight as Jesus, or were the 
subjects of mechanical inspiration. Quite frankly, 
very few of us believe either of these alternatives. 
It is more reasonable to suppose that, bringing 
as they did the limitations of their age to the 
interpretation of the great doctrines of the Father 
in heaven and the kingdom of heaven, they 
veiled them with the clouds of God's wrath that, 
for their eyes, hung in the empyrean. The 
greatest marvel of the inspiration of the pen is 
in the Gospel narratives, which, notwithstanding 
the sombre beliefs of the writers, show us Jesus 
looking up into a cloudless heaven. 

All the parables of the seeds show how deeply 
Jesus felt that what he had to impart could not 
be imparted in the form in which it must develop. 
Everything shows that he perceived that in 
teaching his most devoted followers he was 
speaking as an adult to little children, or rather, 
that that simile dimly expressed the conditions 
under which he laboured. It was only tran- 
scendent faith in the purpose of God that gave 
him the conviction that the seed would grow 
and that quickly. It is worth while observing 
that the seed to which he Hkens the kingdom, 
or the seed of the husbandman to whose action 
he likens the kingdom, is the seed of an annual 
crop. There is no plant that in the glory of its 
bloom is more ethereal, more obviously transient, 
than the oriental mustard; there is nothing that 
will so certainly be mown down as corn. There 
were trees in Palestine that were symbols of what 
was everlasting, which were as large in pf oportioil 



CHAP V PROPHETS AND APOSTLES 143 

to the size of their seeds as any annual; but they 
were not the figure chosen, because seed that 
grew up into men must obviously blossom into 
the ideas of one generation, which could never be 
the precise ideas of the next; and yet, through 
those vistas which he sketched, in which nation 
shall rise against nation and the devotees of 
false Christs shall fill the world with their preach- 
ing, he saw the seed of the kingdom ever self- 
sown and producing an ever-increasing harvest. 

How swift and splendid was the first crop ! 
St. Paul stands out prominent. So small a seed — 
perhaps an earthly acquaintance, perhaps a second- 
hand story — and how great a Christian, lifting 
whole nations God-ward in the ardour of his heart ! 
Yet St. Paul was a Jew, believing that God had 
required the slaughter of beasts; a Pharisee of the 
Pharisees he was, steeped in the idea of an awful, 
far-off, material God, and a cruel, fantastic, material 
law by which came condemnation but no forgive- 
ness ; every tendency of his thought as a Pharisee 
was darkness fighting with the light; a son of the 
later Greeks was he; from them he had learned 
that the unseen only was real ; a citizen of Rome 
was he, and in his mind the mailed hand was 
the only stay of justice. These strains were the 
threads of his thought; every image in his fancy 
must be embroidered by them. Yet see how 
splendid was the work of the salvation by joy in 
him — the faith that levelled mountains of legalism ; 
the love of God that overleaped his highest creed ; 
the glowing heart of friendship to man that he 
bared to the world in the overflowing haste of his 



144 THE FATHER'S HOUSE book n 

burning rhetoric ! We have done our best to 
kill the living, loving marvel of a personality that 
was given for our instruction, by worshipping the 
letter of his word. This man would have been 
no help to us as father or brother if he had been 
a mere instrument of mechanical inspiration; he 
would have been no man, but another Christ, if 
he could have comprehended the revelation of the 
Christ without mixing and tingeing it with the 
darkness of his age. 

What was St. Paul to Jesus .? A lost sheep, 
on whose headstrong track he endured terrible 
sorrow. What was St. Paul to Jesus .? The lost 
coin which, had he not found it, would have lain 
more useless than a mere ornament, a coin out of 
currency, an absolute economic waste. Is this 
reason for exalting St. Paul's opinions and ex- 
periences into a standard to which his Lord's 
teaching must be conformed .? The weight of St. 
Paul's opinion is perhaps, on the whole, on the 
side of the belief that suffering is God's chief 
agent in man's salvation; and an arbitrary exalta- 
tion of this, which was only one phase of his 
thought, has gone far to obliterate the numerous 
passages in which he glorifies the joy of the gos- 
pel. Joy ! joy ! joy ! was his war-cry, although 
he held hard by the saving power of pain which 
was the thought of his age. We, holding to the 
superstition of the past, have ceased to understand 
his joy. 

As with St. Paul, so it is with all that brother- 
hood of love and power — St. Peter and St. James 
and the author of the letter to the Hebrews, even 



CHAP. V PROPHETS AND APOSTLES 145 

St. John the Divine. They had all a far greater 
share of the light than had the Baptist, in whom 
culminated the antagonism between righteousness 
and joy; but they were all necessarily burdened 
with some phase of the asceticism that bound him. 
The bed-rock of their thought was made up, not, 
as we sometimes suppose, of the highest utter- 
ances of the Old Testament prophets and the 
psalmists, but of these mingled and overwhelmed 
with the low ■ standards of the Levitical and 
Apocryphal books and the smaller ideas of a more 
primitive age — the limitations of a national God 
and a national charity. Under such limiting con- 
ditions they had to interpret the Christ by whose 
imparted life they became sons of God. They 
carried the torch of the Light farther into the 
surrounding darkness; but what they carried was 
a torch lit at the Light, not the Light itself, 
and the torch flared and smoked. Its Light was 
glorious and eternal, but the smoke arose because 
the very material of the torch was partly made up 
of error. 

In any case it is obvious that whenever the 
followers of Christ, professing to believe in the 
stupendous fact of the Incarnation, put the words 
and actions of their master Christ only on a level 
with those of Christian teachers, they breed in the 
intelligent onlooker contempt for their conception 
of the Divine nature as shown forth in that brief 
flash of perfect life. If we revise his actions and 
opinions by the standard of any other man it is 
clear that we lack either the power to realise any 
meaning in the doctrine or fidelity to it. It is 



146 THE FATHER'S HOUSE book n 

needful to believe that the Divine Spirit remained 
with them — remains with us for ever — to reflect 
and illuminate and enlarge upon that one exquisite 
creation of virtue's perfect proportion whose out- 
ward form was so soon destroyed; but when we 
ignore or deny any part of the teaching of that 
perfect life and ministry, lower its standards, 
diminish its force, or change its emphasis, because 
his first followers did so, this is surely an actual 
rejection of the doctrine of the divinity of Jesus 
Christ — the most powerful of all rejections if it 
come to the world with Christian authority. 



CHAPTER VI 

IRREVERENT ECLECTICISM 

In view of what has been said in the preceding 
chapter let us now consider what Hght is thrown 
by the Jewish and Christian Scriptures on the 
question of God's relation to suffering. It is a 
remarkable fact that all down the Christian ages, 
alike in times of ignorance and of light, we have 
read those Scriptures with intense solemnity and 
awe and, with that, have not scrupled to exercise 
an eclecticism in our interpretation, the folly and 
irreverence of which any child might perceive. As 
long as we accepted the various witnesses in our 
Bible as all infallible, we were indeed driven to 
practically emphasising one and ignoring another 
in order to get any coherent doctrine as to the 
nature and effect of pain. 

In the later books of the Old Testament, and 
in the early Christian years, we find men struggling 
to adjust their experience of good and bad fortune 
to a progressive belief in God's universal provi- 
dence. For them we can have only respect. 
They were faced with conflicting ideas, and with 
noble candour they wrote as they thought, now 
one way, now another. 

147 



148 THE FATHER'S HOUSE book n 

"As a man chasteneth his son, so the Lord 
thy God chasteneth thee." ^ These words occur 
in a sermon (Deut. v.-xi.) which the authors of 
Deuteronomy put into the mouth of Moses. In 
the same sermon Israel is told that if he obey the 
law every earthly pleasure shall be given as a 
reward. He is also told to destroy utterly every 
neighbouring nation. "Thou shalt smite them 
and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no 
covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them."^ 
If we are not prepared to believe that God incited 
Israel to spend years in slaughtering the men, 
women, children, and cattle of adjacent nations; 
if we are not prepared to believe that had Israel 
kept the laws given them, perfect prosperity and 
immunity from all misfortune would have re- 
sulted, then we must admit that any quotation 
from this same sermon carries with it only the 
authority given to it by our own instinctive sense 
of truth, and that, with our imperfectly developed 
power of spiritual insight, we do well to test any 
favourite quotation by the Gospel story. 

The same may be said of every passage in the 
Old Testament that deals with God's punitive 
actions toward men. The oft-quoted passage in 
Proverbs, "My son, despise not the chastening 
of the Lord, neither weary of his reproof, for whom 
the Lord loveth he chasteneth," is preceded by 
the statement that if we honour God with the 
first-fruits of our substance we shall be given more 
corn and wine than we know what to do with,^ 
and is followed by the statement that the wisdom 

^ Deut. viii. 5. ^ Deut. vii. 2. ^ Prov. iii. 10. 



CH. VI IRREVERENT ECLECTICISM 149 

produced by God's seventy will give us length of 
days, honour, and riches.^ Both the idea that God 
saves by suffering and the idea that the good are 
to be happy in this life have equal countenance in 
this passage; if we reject its validity as teaching 
that the deserving will be happy in this world we 
cannot urge its authority as teaching that suffer- 
ing is a mark of God's favour. As a matter of 
fact, the saying that God chastens those he loves 
was accepted and emphasised by that higher class 
of Jewish religious thinkers who looked to suffer- 
ing for salvation, and was by them incorporated 
into Christianity, just as the more popular idea 
that earthly prosperity was the reward promised 
for service was imported into Christianity by 
the converts from legal Judaism. 

There are not many more noble pieces of 
literature in the world than the Epistle to the 
Hebrews, very few from which so much of the 
true spirit of Christianity can be learned ; but there 
are passages in it that we cannot incorporate into 
our scheme of thought, nor can we, in these days, 
think ourselves into the author's point of view on 
many matters. Take, for example, the statement 
in chap. vi. verses 4 to 6, that if a convert, having 
understood the Christian doctrine and known 
its power, should fall away, it is impossible 
to renew such an one unto repentance. The 
chapters that have been written to explain away 
the plain meaning of this passage prove that the 
com^mon sense of the Church does not accept the 
author in this matter. Or take the argument 

^ Prov. iii. i6. 



150 THE FATHER'S HOUSE book n 

concerning the oath God sware to Abraham,^ or 
the historical sketch of Melchisedec.^ Of these 
we rightly say that unless the future throws further 
light upon their meaning, they imply trains of 
thought and imagery which mankind has out- 
grown. When the same writer assures us that the 
suffering of Jesus on earth wrought his purification,^ 
and quotes the Old Testament to show that God's 
action to those he loves best is always punitive,^ 
his words cannot establish the doctrine for us. 
Perplexity of ideas as to the method of God's 
dealing with men and the origin of misfortunes is 
also shown in the magnificent Apocalyptic poem 
of the Revelation. The apostle puts into the 
mouth of the risen Christ this quotation from the 
Book of Proverbs. "As many as I love I rebuke 
and chasten."^ Here Jesus himself is represented 
as the source of pain. In the same vision he is 
represented as saying, "The devil is about to cast 
some of you into prison, where ye may have 
tribulation ten days";^ "Antipas, my faithful one, 
who w^as killed . . . where Satan dwelleth." ^ In 
these texts we seem to have the Evil One as the 
source of human suffering. Again, in the same 
vision the Lord says, "He that keepeth my works 
unto the end, to him will I give authority over the 
nations, and he shall rule them with a rod of iron, 
as the vessels of the potter are broken to pieces." ^ 
Here we seem to have the spirits of just men made 

^ Hebrews vi. 13. ^ Rev. iii. 19. 

^ Ibid. vii. I-17. ^ Ibid. ii. IQ. 

^Ibtd. V. 8. Ubtd. ii. 13. 

^ Ibid. xii. 5-12. ^ Ibid. ii. 26-27. 



CH. VI IRREVERENT ECLECTICISM 151 

perfect as a source of evil to wicked men upon 
earth. From among many similar passages we 
may take that saHent one where St. Paul states 
that his thorn in the flesh was the messenger of 
Satan, and that yet he was taught to regard it as 
the will of God. This is in harmony with the 
Book of Job, and the idea underlies much of the 
best literature of the intervening centuries. An 
eclecticism which emphasises one of these two sets 
of ideas and ignores the other, while claiming the 
authority of Scripture for such proceeding, is self- 
destructive. 

We are forced, then, if we would find any 
certain voice telling us the relation of God to 
physical evil, to look for it only in the revelation 
of Jesus. 



CHAPTER VII 

DREAMS OF JUSTICE 

We are all imbued with the notion, not only that 
under the rule of a good God justice must exist, 
but that mankind has arrived at some idea of in 
what that divine justice must consist. It seems 
more likely that the human race is still in its 
childhood, and that it has not grasped such a 
notion of justice as approximates to divine justice. 
In this connection it is a very interesting fact that 
the doctrine of Jesus in some points sets aside the 
human sense of justice as negligible. 

Our modern notion of ideal justice has been 
expressed as "the distribution of good and evil 
according to desert." 

"When we speak of the world as justly governed 
by God, we seem to mean that, if we could know 
the whole of human existence, we should find 
that happiness is distributed among men according 
to their deserts. . . . Common sense seems to 
hold that a man who has done wrong ought to 
suffer pain in return (even if no benefit result 
either to him or to others from the pain), and that 
justice requires this; although the individual 

152 



cHAP.vn DREAMS OF JUSTICE 153 

wronged ought not to seek or desire to inflict the 
pain."^ 

This idea of justice has been appHed among 
reHgious men in formulating an objection to what 
has been called the "substitutional" doctrine of 
the death of Jesus; men will say that God could 
not be so unjust as to punish one for another's sin, 
that every man must bear the punishment of his 
own sin, and so forth. 

Theory apart, in the actual world around us 
retributive justice, as man has conceived it and as 
expressed in the above quotation, does not appear 
to have any existence. We meet with rude 
attempts toward it made by human civilisations 
for their own protection, but these admittedly do 
not realise the ideal. The idea, however, of the 
Supreme Power as dealing to every man a punish- 
ment exactly fitted to his misdoing rose with the 
conception of individual responsibility, and is the 
idea of justice upon which all penal codes are 
founded. It was a strong force in Greek thought, 
was certainly the strongest bulwark of Roman 
civilisation, and lies perhaps as deep as any assur- 
ance in the modern mind. This idea has been an 
important factor in the education of the race; so 
also were the communal ideas of justice which 
preceded it, and which for a long period of transi- 
tion were confused with it. When a man regarded 
himself as only part of a tribe, when law-breaking 
was conceived as producing in him a quality of 
guilt which was infectious, and which would rapidly 
spread to the innocent around him, men's idea of 

1 The Methods of Ethics, by H. Sidgwick, Book III. Chap. V. 



154 THE FATHER'S HOUSE book n 

righteous dealing often involved the destruction 
of a whole family or tribe or nation; even the 
very cattle they possessed were also exterminated 
if they came under the ban. This was a sense of 
right which seems to have existed for more centuries 
than has the more modern notion. It had in it 
germs of truth that an extreme individualism is 
apt to ignore; but it was not a true ideal. It 
is impossible to think that it dwells as an ideal 
in the heart of a personal God; yet it is the copy 
and reflection of the justice which his laws of 
matter mete out. The child that plays with fire 
is burnt, but so also, if he have done enough 
mischief, is the house containing him, and, as far 
as natural law is concerned, the town in which he 
lives and all in it. 

The ideal of a retributive justice adjusted to 
personal deserts must pass away, as did the older 
ideal; because the very essence of it is that a man 
must bear the punishment of his own sin and not 
of another's sin, and such justice does not, and 
can never, exist in life as we know it. A world 
in which it exists may or may not be possible, but 
we have not the slightest evidence of its possibility. 
Each individual in such a world would need to be 
so separated from all others as to bear to them 
no relation of love or affection or protection or 
dependence. In our actual world a man is 
commonly loved more or less by father and mother, 
sister and brother, wife and child, friend and fellow- 
citizen. If he degrades himself by vice or crime, 
some or all of these suffer more than he ; and the 
more really innocent they are of any inclination to 



CHAP. VII DREAMS OF JUSTICE 155 

his failings, the more sensitive they are to the suffer- 
ing. If, as the Christian beheves, God also loves this 
wrongdoer with a love infinite and tender beyond 
the sum of all earthly loves, and with a divine 
innocence to which the thought of wrong is loath- 
some, God also must suffer — and suffer with 
divine intensity of passion — for the man's sin. 
What justice can we conceive of here ? What 
can requite the sinner's father and mother for the 
heartbreak his sin has caused them ^ or his wife, 
who identifies herself with him, exercising for him 
the passion of contrition of which he is wholly 
incapable ^ or his child for a blasted youth and 
the taint of moral obliquity which he in his turn 
may transmit to future generations ? or his fellows 
for the degree in which the average level of virtue 
has fallen ? above all, what can requite God for 
his pain ? Can any suffering on the culprit's part 
requite them ? Certainly not ; it will only increase 
their woe. As the suffering of the culprit is 
increased by penalty, the suffering of all those 
innocent ones who love him is increased, and 
God's suffering is cumulatively increased. The 
God in whom the Christian believes — immanent 
in the spirits of men, transcending them in ever- 
vigilant compassion — suffers in the sorrow of all 
as well as in their sin; he suffers, therefore, in the 
sorrow of parent and friend, wife and child, and 
of the culprit also. How, then, can the endurance 
of any punishment by the culprit, though richly 
merited, set things right when every moment of 
pain that he endures inflicts greater pain upon the 
innocent .? It is, then, the utmost folly to talk of 



156 THE FATHER'S HOUSE book n 

a man appropriating the punishment of his own 
sins, for even if we suppose him to be a member 
of society unloved by any and worthless to all, 
we must still be aware that his suffering and 
degradation means suffering or degradation to all 
who touch his existence at any point, and the 
greater according to their goodness. Thus it is 
clear that in any human existence which we can 
understand, the innocent, both God and man, 
suffer for the guilty, and anv penalty inflicted on 
guilt must increase their suffering. 

This, to our minds, unjust retribution, which 
involves the innocent suffering with the guilty 
and suffering more than the guilty, may be 
regarded in two ways, either of which suggest that 
it may be a part of some higher justice beyond 
our sight. It may be regarded as a deterrent to 
other would-be sinners; it may be right that the 
sinner, and every one else in his generation to some 
degree, should suffer for the sin in order that 
those who come after may be made afraid; but 
we must allow that this, even as it affects the 
sinner, is not consonant with the modern notion 
of justice, which would refuse to punish a man 
because other men's children will be frail and 
peccable. Or, secondly, it mav be that sin is not 
an accident of this or that man's will, but the 
manifestation of a vital power or evil personality 
other than human, whose every activity is doomed 
to self-destruction in which minor personalities 
who admit his working must share to the degree 
in which they admit it. On this theor}^ pain, 
according to the law of the kingdom of evil, might 



CHAP. VII DREAMS OF JUSTICE 157 

necessarily follow sin, being part of the process, 
the working of the seeds of death. Taking this 
view we do not conceive of the penalty as meted 
out by the direct will of a righteous judge, but 
merely as an evil and inevitable growth from the 
germ of sin — sin and pain together being, as it 
were, a cancer in the individual and the race which, 
unless. cured, must destroy its victim. 

Such an explanation of the actual condition of 
things may be the embodiment of a higher justice,, 
but it is a justice higher than we have conceived 
or can now conceive. On such a view the penalty, 
not being inflicted by a judge, could not be remitted 
as a judge might remit a sentence he himself had 
passed. Let us attempt a crude analogy. A man 
might do another serious injury with an explosive, 
but if the circumstances were such that the crimi- 
nal could not avoid being shattered to pieces, the 
injured man could not by the frankest forgiveness 
remit the penalty. Similarly we may conceive that 
the forgiveness of the divine judge could not 
interfere with the action of laws he has ordained. 
All that he could do would be to lift the culprit 
out of the sphere in which those laws operated, if 
there were such other sphere. In human aff^airs 
we see what suggests this possibility. Many 
diseases may be cured by lifting men from foul 
surroundings to live in cleanliness and purer air. 
Strong sunshine will kill those germs of disease 
that make ravages in the dark. 

We thus see that the idea of pain being re- 
tributive may in two ways, not mutually exclusive, 
be rendered possibly reasonable; but, in working. 



158 THE FATHER'S HOUSE book n 

retributive pain never embodies the ideal of 
individual justice because of the greater measure of 
innocent suffering which the infliction of penalty 
always involves. The only way in which such 
retributive pain can be conceived as realising 
justice is by supposing that it can be so allotted to 
the culprit as to raise his moral worth to such 
extent that he will certainly be, after the experience, 
the source of an amount of joy to his fellows and 
to God that will exactly compensate their innocent 
suffering on his account. 

How far does experience suggest that the 
suffering of penalty has a corresponding, or any, 
reformatory effect upon the culprit ^ Reviewing 
the storm and stress of evolution, the moralist 
inquires what part pain has played in the age-long 
development of character, and it is not uncommon 
to assume that in this aspect the uses of pain have 
been all beneficial. Against this theory we have 
to set the fact that pain has undoubtedly produced 
such qualities as fear, cowardice, cunning, anger, 
hatred, spite. These qualities are not evoked in 
an individual or in a race by the joyful exercise of 
the natural powers of life ; therefore, if to the pain 
and difl&culty of existence we owe noble character- 
istics — strength of will, fortitude, courage, com- 
passion — we also derive our more malignant 
qualities from the same source; and any argument 
as to the value of pain which emphasises the virtues 
it engenders and does not recognise the vices 
derived from it, is fallacious. Indeed, it would 
appear that we might go farther, for while, as our 
knowledge stands at present, we have no reason at 



CHAP. VII DREAMS OF JUSTICE 159 

all to suppose that a creature whose ancestors had 
never suffered privation or been hurt or robbed 
v^ould know anger, hatred, or envy, we have no 
proof that the opposite virtues could not have been 
developed with less racial suffering. For example, 
a child who has never been threatened or hurt does 
not, except by heredity, feel fear of its kind ; but 
being possessed of a new plaything, it may feel 
compassion for the child who has none, although 
the fact of having no new toy would not of itself 
necessitate positive suffering in the other. Again, 
fortitude, strength of will, and courage are culti- 
vated by strenuous pursuits which men rank as 
pleasures, as well as by misfortune. It is therefore 
more reasonable to suppose that human and 
animal virtue might have been developed without 
what appears to us pain and disorder than to 
suppose that angry passions could have existed 
without these irritating causes. 

We thus conclude that the penalty of wrong- 
doing is not, and cannot be, so distributed in this 
social order as to realise man's ideal of justice; 
and further, that there is no presumption — quite 
the contrary — that the corrective influence of 
penalty so far as borne by the culprit, is such as to 
give the community by his reformation an advan- 
tage that balances the suffering he has cost. 

Further, if we are bound by the constitution of 
our minds to believe that justice exists and to 
attribute it to God, we must do so frankly, admit- 
ting that we have no conception of what divine 
justice must be. 

This is an important point to realise in studying 



i6o THE FATHER'S HOUSE book n 

the gospel of Jesus. To accept that gospel is to 
believe that ideal justice exists, because without it 
there could be no forgiveness. Because we cannot 
comprehend God's justice we are forced to realise 
that we can in no way comprehend his forgiveness. 
Forgiveness from God to man, from man to man, 
Jesus taught was a terrible reality. How terrible 
to man the obligation to forgive his brother all 
manner of wrong ! how terrible to know that God's 
forgiveness depends upon this ! How terrible to a 
man the joy of knowing himself forgiven by God ! 
And Jesus represents God's forgiveness as entirely 
beyond and above human notions of desert; he 
always represents God as maintaining toward man 
an attitude of entire forgiveness and bestowing 
upon man the consciousness of his forgiveness in 
instant response to every heart-felt appeal to his 
mercy. Further, he represents God as imposing 
the same attitude on every faithful soul toward his 
fellow-men ; if a man would continue conscious of 
God's forgiveness he must maintain toward other 
men the attitude God maintains toward him, an 
attitude of perfect forgiveness which will be as 
frankly expressed the moment the wrongdoer 
desires its expression. 

That such whole-hearted forgiveness should be 
consistent with God's infliction of penalty on the 
sinner is only possible under the conviction that the 
penalty is good for the sinner. We have seen that 
there is no evidence to uphold this very old 
explanation of the problem of suffering; we must 
now observe that Jesus did not give his authority 
to it. He speaks of penalties and places of punish- 



CHAP, .ai DREAMS OF JUSTICE i6i 

ment as wholly bad, and urges their essential 
harmfulness as one of the strongest motives to 
righteousness. He speaks of forgiveness from 
God to man, and from man to man, as an action of 
supreme importance, and emphasises the suffering, 
v^hich is not penal, of those vs^ho, being persecuted, 
must thus forgive. In his imagery the tyrant v^ho 
kills the body and casts the spirit into hell is not 
God. 

But more, there can be no doubt that Jesus 
taught that God's forgiveness, when so bestowed as 
to enter into man's consciousness, did include escape 
from the penalty of sin; and the manner of escape 
must be indicated by the conditions inseparable 
from the bestowal of the gift. The appeal for 
mercy, however instinctive, however little thought 
out, involves an estimate of God's character as 
love; it involves the recognition, though but 
momentary, that the gift can only proceed from 
pure love, cannot be merited either by virtue or 
by tears; and from this — if the consciousness of 
being forgiven is to be continuous — from this 
momentary conception of God as love must pro- 
ceed the same love to men, based, not upon their 
deserts, but upon that love which in its essence 
is feeling as our fellow feels, or community of life. 

When Jesus spoke of this condition of heart — 
the reception of God's gift of forgiveness, the out- 
flow and passing on of that gift to the world — he 
was not speaking of assent to a doctrine, or to a 
theory of life, but of a new and joyful vision of 
God as anointing man with his own spirit — a vision 
which flesh and blood could not reveal but the 

M 



i62 THE FATHER'S HOUSE book n 

Father in heaven. The endowment of love was 
to be a new and heavenly treasure within men of 
very practical worth, a strength of love which 
would save them, not only from sin's penalty, but 
from their sins; a wisdom of love which would 
teach them what to say to their persecutors when 
they were set upon their defence; an insight of 
love which would make them the light of the 
world. 

From this it seems that God's forgiveness lifts 
man into a new relationship with his environment, 
or we may say the intimate and personal convic- 
tion of God's forgiveness only belongs to the man 
who has been thus lifted. In this environment 
there is nothing to fear. The Evil Power who 
tempts to sin and punishes the sinner has here no 
part. Again and again Jesus points out that fear 
belongs to a lower region, and not to that in which 
man estimates God as love, that fear only comes 
where faith is not. But the penalty of sin he 
always speaks of as an object of great fear; he 
urges the fear of it upon men. Indeed he taught 
that the penalty of sin, like the sin which involved 
it, was evil. 

Thus we conclude, in harmony with the thought 
of all good men, that there must be a divine 
justice, as there must be a divine mercy; but we 
have reason to think the human mind has, as yet, 
no conception of what this divine justice is. 
The conclusion to which the gospel points is 
undoubtedly that put forward by the Johannine 
writings, which seek to express the divine justice 
by the word "love.'' 



BOOK III 
GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH 



163 



CHAPTER I 

THE DEVIL AND HIS ANGELS 

We have tried to show that the v^orks of Jesus 
must be the strongest and simplest expression of 
the revelation he came to bring. In the following 
chapters we shall be concerned with his works of 
healing, and first with his treatment of "unclean 
spirits," and with his doctrine concerning the 
kingdom of evil as therein exemplified. 

In the present flux of thought and historical 
knowledge, suspense of judgment is the wisest 
attitude toward the problems connected with the 
ancient doctrines of good and bad spirits, and as 
to the true significance of the teaching of Jesus 
concerning them. At the same time, to ignore 
or mimimise any prominent feature in the record 
of Jesus, because we are still awaiting more light 
in the matter, must be inimical to progress. Truth 
has nothing to fear from the most searching ex- 
amination of fact, and we are bound to make that 
examination, although it does not follow that with 
all the facts we are now able to muster we can 
arrive at any certain conclusion. It will, moreover, 
often be found that the hasty generalisations 

165 



i66 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

of modern thought about ancient behefs are of 
less substantial stuff than the beliefs they would 
supersede. Any belief that has held the world 
for ages is likely to bear a close relation to fact, 
even though the fact be wrongly interpreted. 

The Christian thought of Europe from the 
first has always exercised a curious choice in regard 
to the teaching of Jesus about the unseen world, 
forcing a literal meaning on certain figurative pas- 
sages in that teaching, and admitting the wholly 
figurative nature of others. This habit bears 
witness to the difficulty of knowing, in many 
cases, what he really meant — a difficulty, we may 
remark in passing, that shows the need of accept- 
ing his works as a clue to his words. In such a 
passage as that in which Jesus bids his disciples 
rejoice, not so much because spirits were in sub- 
jection to them, but rather because their names 
were written in the book of life, the scholarship 
of the Church has for the most part understood 
"the book of life" to be a figure of speech, while 
accepting the "spirits" as objective entities. Is 
this warranted .? There was in very ancient thought 
an association between the casting out of demons 
and the practice of keeping a private name in 
some secret and sacred text. The mystic import- 
ance of a name, its influence on the fate of its 
bearer, the custom of writing the name in a 
sacred book in order to secure safety from ill- 
fortune — these notions are found in the most 
ancient magical formulas. Later, among the Jews 
we find the idea of an eternal book which was 
kept before God, and later again, the doctrine 



CH. I THE DEVIL AND HIS ANGELS 167 

that the whole history of men was written down 
ia the eternal books. This last form of the idea 
was elaborated after Hellenism affected Jewish 
thought. This "book of life" was certainly not 
concrete; it was allied in nature rather to the 
Platonic "ideas." If we assume, as contemporary 
use seems to justify us in doing, that Jesus used 
the phrase, "the book of life," figuratively, are 
we justified in taking literally his words in the 
same passage about the evil " spirits ".f* This 
opens a large question on which modern science 
and historic demonology throw a much less certain 
light than the modern man often supposes. 

We turn to consider the attitude of Jesus 
toward human ills and their cause, and find that 
he certainly appeared to give his authority to the 
belief in a separate Evil Will, subordinate to God, 
transcending man in evil power, and immanent 
in all man's wrongdoings and diseases. Is this 
view inconsistent with any knowledge we now 
possess .? and if not, how far does it harmonise 
with it ^ 

While we have no proof that all he said and 
did in this connection may not have been simply 
a parable teaching a higher truth, we are, by the 
laws of interpretation, compelled first to consider 
words and acts in their face meaning. Current 
opinion is disposed to treat the Evil One as a 
superstition, and to regard evil as only the negation 
of good. If we agree that to believe in an evil 
power outside ourselves that makes for unrighteous- 
ness is absurd, we must assume that our Lord's 
doctrine was a parable, unless it was a mistake. 



i68 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

Without coming to any dogmatic conclusion, let 
us inquire what reason there is for joining those 
who would cast out the Evil One and his agents 
from the arena of sane ideas. 

In the region in which human thought can be 
confirmed by experience, we have to recognise the 
existence, side by side, of a multiplicity of wills. 
Experience also shows that those wills are not 
all good. Let the conception of a metaphysical 
dualism of good and evil be acknowledged unten- 
able; but so also to most minds is the conception 
of a metaphysical multiplicity of wills; man's free 
will perishes in the Absolute just as surely as the 
devil perishes. Our point is that we cannot admit 
the reality of free will in the domain of practical 
reason and deny the reality of the evil will in the 
same domain.^ 

The facts of the religious consciousness appear 
to require a conception not only of a Supreme 
Will that is good, but of evil as a positive voli- 
tional force. The Christian's personal experience 
will in this matter weigh with him more than 
argument, and opinions will differ. We may take 
one illustration out of many that would serve to 
show the difficulty of considering evil as a mere 
negation. Let us take any body of men who 
certainly cherish w^hat Dr. Gwatkin calls "the 
vital spark of mysticism" — "the conviction, acted 
on, that a true communion with the divine is given 
to all that purify themselves with all the force of 
heart and soul and mind." We must believe, as 
the tenor of their lives is good, that God finds en- 

^ See Appendix C. 



CH. I THE DEVIL AND HIS ANGELS i6q 

trance to their minds in the religion they practise. 
We observe, however, that when some new move- 
ment of the higher Hfe begins to stir about them, 
or, as we might put it, some new development of 
the Christ-life finds expression in some part of the 
public consciousness, it is this very class of religious 
men who commonly offer it the most violent 
opposition. It is not until the life of a generation 
has proved that the new thing is of God that 
they, or their successors, receive it. This seems to 
suggest that the very susceptibility of their nature 
to divine influence renders them also more open 
than irreligious men to fiendish influence. What 
they oppose is often a matter, not of belief, but 
of mere humanity. The nature of their opposi- 
tion, its force and pertinacity, certainly suggest 
the work of a spiritual evil within their own 
spirits. 

If we reject the idea of an Evil Will, spiritual 
and positive, are we prepared to support any 
alternative theory ^ Shall we say that moral evil 
is not a reality ^ that if a man tramples his child 
or his mother to death, his action is relatively the 
best that might be .? Or, granting the reality of 
wrong, can we assume that in all this vast universe 
of dreadful a thing as sin occurs only on this atom 
of earth and only in the heart of man .? Or, if we 
admit that the evil which is part of all things that 
we know may also be a part of vaster regions of 
life than we can conceive of, must we assume that 
it is always, everywhere, sporadic, and lacks any 
synthetic determination ? We find a final Source 
and Centre of good to be a reasonable postulate 



1 70 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

from the good we see everywhere; why, then, is 
such a postulate from omnipresent evil unreason- 
able ? All that seems to be required to preserve 
the unity of nature is that the Evil Will should 
act under some law of self-destruction which keeps 
it subordinate to the Good Will which bringeth 
forth life. 

Let us briefly glance at the history of this idea 
of an Evil Will in active antagonism to God, to 
see how far it may thus be justified. 

We have now recovered from the graves of 
dead nations an account of the way in which the 
Gentile world before Christ expressed its religious 
passion, an account sufficiently clear for us to know 
how far the world had then come in its search 
after God. Voluminous liturgies, which date from 
some four millenniums before Christ, show well- 
established religious ideas, which were modified 
and developed, but not radically changed, in the 
succeeding centuries. From Babylonia and Assyria, 
from Egypt, especially from Persia and Greece, we 
gather elements that contributed to the religious 
beliefs of Palestine at the Christian era. In the 
forefront of all genuine, practical religion was the 
belief that misfortunes had their source in the 
unseen powers, and that relief from them must be 
sought by prayer addressed either to the better 
disposition of the very power which sent them, or 
to some other unseen power of a better disposition. 
In polytheistic religions there was a tendency to 
attribute benefits to the higher deities and afflic- 
tions to inferior powers; individual misfortunes, 
especially bodily ills, came to be regarded as the 



CH. I THE DEVIL AND HIS ANGELS 171 

work of minor deities, or, later, of mischievous 
spirits of a low order. 

But all progress in the unification of knowledge 
seems to be dependent on the conception of a God 
supreme and good. The One of the scientist, the 
One of the philosopher, the One of the theologian, 
is the only satisfaction of reason and the great 
incitement to the search for truth. At the same 
time the mere conception of God as One was not 
sufficient for moral development; the One must 
also be good. We scarcely realise how slowly the 
need to think of God as moral has asserted itself 
even among the Hebrews. Up to a comparatively 
late date in Old Testament theology the conception 
of God's oneness led to making his spirit the 
immediate source and inspiration of all human 
qualities, — alike of love and hatred, truth and 
cunning, placability and anger, — just as the neces- 
sity of believing God to be one leads men now to 
suppose his will to be the direct source of all 
human fortune — of joy and sorrow, health and 
disease, scarcity and plenty. The later Jewish 
prophets, however, and the writers of Deuteronomy 
presented God as preferring justice and truth to 
license and dishonesty. Thus the Hebrew religion 
had the early distinction of attributing to God 
only what they thought to be moral goodness; 
and the most religious Jews before Christ came 
reached the idea that God's will was always on 
the side of moral right as they understood it. 

We have already noted that among the heathen 
misfortunes of all sorts had come to be regarded 
either as the legitimate anger of good deities or as 



172 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

the mischief inflicted by inferior powers. When 
the Jews had arrived at some distinction between 
moral good and moral evil, and realised that the 
first only could be attributed to God, they naturally 
thought of the source of moral evil as in opposition 
to God. If God could not tempt man to do evil, 
temptation was naturally attributed to another 
power. This power was not in any way co-equal 
with God or able to act without his permission, 
but still powerful in mundane affairs, as we see in 
the prologue to the Book of Job. 

Although there can be no doubt that a belief 
in a malign spiritual kingdom or hierarchy came 
into the Jewish religion from heathen sources, 
chiefly those of the Babylonian stock, some 
equivalent for *' Satan" must have loomed on their 
religious horizon in any case when their prophets 
perceived with ever-growing clearness that the 
inspiration of evil passions in the heart of man 
could no longer be attributed to God. The fact 
of its foreign source is not to the prejudice of the 
belief, because the earlier Jewish religious concep- 
tions — of God, of holiness, of transgression, etc. 
— were originally from the same source, tapped, as 
one might say, farther back. Wherever learnt, 
the belief in a devil was bound to come. The 
conception of man as the origin of that profound 
principle which, opposed to good, appears to lie 
at the heart of all things that we know, and to be 
represented in some aspect of all things, was not 
possible to the ancient world, and therefore the 
conception of the Evil Will in the spiritual world 
was to them a necessity of thought. 



CH. I THE DEVIL AND HIS ANGELS 173 

Our question is whether we have outgrown 
this necessity. The notion of an Evil Will 
outside our own does not in the slightest degree 
explain the origin of evil; but, granting that evil 
exists and is permitted to run rampant for the 
sake of personal moral freedom, there is no law 
of reason which requires us to identify it with 
ourselves. It thus does not appear to be more 
superstitious to believe in the Evil One than to 
believe that man in this earthly life — a tiny span 
in the vast cycles of time — should have a mono- 
poly in sin — the bye-product of personal free 
will. If we believe, as the Christian must, that 
God is omnipotent and good, and yet permits 
moral disorder in man, there is no fresh difficulty 
in holding to his goodness and omnipotence and 
admitting that moral disorder exists in the whole 
scheme of things as we know it, and beyond our 
knowledge. If A, out of the wickedness of his 
own heart, can do a cruel act to his neighbour, 
and B can yet believe that "God's in his heaven; 
all's right with the world," there is no fresh 
difficulty for B in believing that the Evil Will, 
out of the wickedness of his heart, has been at his 
evil work from the foundation of all worlds, causing 
all the cataclysms and cruelties of nature, while 
yet God is good and omnipotent. It is merely 
childish to say the one is tenable, the other 
untenable. 

The dilemma, "If God is, whence comes evil.? 
if he is not, whence comes good .?" must remain 
the philosophic background to all religious specula- 
tion. We here assume that God is, and that evil 



174 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

is; and we are concerned with what appears to be 
a confusion in the minds of us moderns, who 
heheve that God is the supreme personahty, who 
admit that there is evidence of moral disorder in 
this world, and yet adopt the idea, common now- 
adays, that to believe in the Evil One is super- 
stitious. If we have no better reason than has 
appeared for refusing to interpret the exorcism of 
Jesus in its natural sense, we do not offer him the 
respect which we pay to any modern teacher. 

Further than this, it would appear that a belief 
even in a multiplicity of devils is not unreasonable 
if we believe in human immortality. It is not 
unreasonable to suppose that among the spirits of 
the dead there are moral differences similar to 
those that exist in this life. Nor have we any 
reason to assume that the Evil Will may not use 
the worst of them to influence the affairs of this 
earth, through that mysterious connection between 
mind and brain of which we know nothing. As 
long as we frankly confess that we can know 
nothing about the influence of bad angels, and can 
joyfully resign ourselves to God's protection, we 
need not fear superstition. There is no more 
need to refer to the difficulties of a philosophic 
dualism in connection with the speculation about 
societies or kingdoms of bad spirits, than in con- 
nection with societies or kingdoms of bad men 
whom we see. Much that must appear to us 
grossly superstitious has been connected with such 
a belief, but this need not condemn the belief 
itself. Let us bear in mind that we are speaking 
of spirit, not matter; we are not referring to the 



CH. I THE DEVIL AND HIS ANGELS 175 

creatures of the spiritualist's imagination — crea- 
tures as grossly material as a gas or a ray of light or 
a sound. It was a superstition to believe that God 
made the world in six days; but it does not follow 
that it is a superstition to believe that God made 
the world. If it is a gross superstition to believe 
that any invisible spiritual being can have direct 
influence upon matter as we know it, it does 
not follow that spiritual intelligences around us 
cannot affect our minds, and through our minds 
our brains — the nature of the connection between 
our own m.inds and our brains being quite un- 
known; the fact of that connection being only an 
object of faith and a postulate of reason. Because 
we realise that outside the living organism spirit 
cannot affect matter, because we do not believe 
in poltergeists throwing stones, or in spirits making 
noises, or in any objective incarnation of a devil, 
such, for example, as that at which Luther aimed 
his inkpot, it does not follow that it is impossible 
to believe in evil spirits who might obtain posses- 
sion of mind in man or brute. 

Let us admit, then, that to believe in one 
supreme Good as the source and sustainer of all 
does not necessarily exclude a belief in an Evil 
Will, and in evil spirits controlled by him, who 
may, for all we know, work evil on our minds, 
and diseases on our bodies through our minds, and 
all sorts of pain and grief upon us through the 
minds and actions of other men. Wicked or 
diseased people on earth can do all this; why not 
wicked spirits in the unseen .? But let it be noted 
that such a belief limits the channel of evil in this 



176 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

world to the human mind; as far as we have any 
knowledge of moral evil, there only it enters into 
our experience; as far as we have any practical 
concern with it thence it proceeds. "Out of the 
heart of man proceed evil thoughts." 

If we believe in human selves as apart from 
bodies, and in immortality, we by this belief have 
already in the invisible world enormous multi- 
tudes of human spirits. These are not all good; 
they are not all in one stage of progress; the 
degrees in which they are unrighteous, and the 
degrees in which they may be evolving into higher 
orders of being or degenerating, must be almost 
infinitely various — for evolution as we know it 
implies the progress of some and the degeneration 
of others. Again, all that we know of human 
spirits shows them to have not only individual but 
collective life. By their very nature they are 
forced to form themselves into larger psychological 
units — crowds, societies, kingdoms, hierarchies. 
The idea that at death the human soul, naked 
and alone, may aspire to hold communion with 
none but God, may be beautiful, but is foreign to 
any reality we know. The psychic necessity of 
loving the brother in order to love God probably 
obtains even more perfectly in the spirit world. 
We can hardly conceive of a humanity beyond 
the grave and gate of death broken up into the 
naked and desolate condition of separate units. 
Our spirits must cease to be what we understand 
as human when they cease to coalesce in certain 
common aspects of existence. Thus we are driven, 
either to deny human immortality, or to postulate 



CH. I THE DEVIL AND HIS ANGELS 177 

a change at death so great that it would destroy 
the continuity of human existence, or else to admit 
the probability of spirits and organisations of spirits 
bad enough and influential enough to be spoken 
about in such terms as those in which Jesus spoke 
of the kingdom of evil. 

Lastly, as we look upon the vast universe, the 
myriad ranks of heavenly bodies and the ordered 
variety in vegetable and animal life, as our minds 
attain in all things to the principle, natura non 
facit salturriy it is not easy to conceive a world of 
spirits in which there is nothing at all but the One 
Supreme and Almighty and mankind. It is quite 
true that man has no absolute moral need to cast 
the net of his imagination over other beings and 
fix them in his creeds; but he is forced to admit 
the possibility of their existence, and of their 
varying moral character. 

We thus see that, so far from the belief in a 
kingdom of evil being foolish, it is an inference 
consistent with our knowledge of self and our 
belief in God; and the belief in bad spirits is a 
fair inference from the belief in human immortality. 
If we get rid of the ancient belief in the Evil One, 
as, since the Reformation, certain parts of the 
world have got rid of the belief in demons, there 
is some evidence that we shall find that, out of 
our universities, out of the very heart of the latest 
and most serious attempts to re-construct intelligent 
belief upon what some thinkers conceive to be 
the ruins of Christian orthodoxy, the devils will 
issue again. 

We have, in the region of pure metaphysic, 

N 



178 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

Dr. M'Taggart's suggestion of an eternal plurality 
of minds. Fie states his theory thus : — 

"To sum up — the self answers to the descrip- 
tion of the fundamental differentiations of the 
Absolute. Nothing else that we can know or 
imagine does so. The idea of the self has certain 
characteristics which can be explained if the self 
is taken as one of the fundamental differentiations 
but of which no explanation has been offered on 
any other theory, except that of rejecting the idea 
of the self altogether, and sinking into complete 
scepticism. The self is so paradoxical that we 
can find no explanation for it except its absolute 
reality." ^ 

Prof. Gwatkin summarises Dr. M^Taggart's 
ultimate theory in the words, "The universe may 
be a harmonious system of persons with a tendency 
to improvement." ^ If this be a fair interpreta- 
tion of the theory it would seem quite possible 
that, pending improvement, some of these eternal 
wills, including our own and those of our neigh- 
bours, may be devil-like rather than god-like. 

We find the same suggestion of a plurality of 
minds expressed in a concrete religious form by 
Prof. James : — 

"The only thing that religious experience 
unequivocally testifies to is that we can experience 
union with something larger than ourselves, and in 
that union find our greatest peace. Philosophy 
. . . and mysticism . . . identify the something 
with a unique God who is the all-inclusive soul 

^ Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, p. 26. 
^ The Knowledge of God, preface, p. ix. 



CH. I THE DEVIL AND HIS ANGELS 179 

of the world. Popular opinion, respectful to 
their authority, follows the example which they 
set. Meanwhile ... all the facts require is that 
the power should be other and larger than our 
conscious selves. Anything larger will do, if 
only it be large enough to trust for the next step. 
It need not be infinite, it need not be solitary. 
It might conceivably even be only a larger and 
more godlike self, of which the present self would 
then be but the mutilated expression, and the 
universe might conceivably be a collection of such 
selves, of different degrees of inclusiveness, with 
no absolute unity realised in it at all. Thus would 
a sort of polytheism return upon us." ^ 

It will here occur to the reader that if men 
with a genius for wickedness are, like men with 
a genius for goodness, inspired by a larger power 
which is a super-mundane self, that self, in their 
case, is not a god but a devil. Indeed, this last 
writer goes on to reply something of the sort : — 

"Upholders of the monistic view will say to 
such a polytheism that unless there be one all- 
inclusive God, our guarantee of safety is left 
imperfect. . . . Common sense is less sweeping in 
its demands than philosophy or mysticism have 
been wont to be, and can suffer the notion of this 
world being partly saved and partly lost." ^ 

Thus it will be seen that the recent speculations 
of men whom it is not the fashion to regard as 
superstitious, postulate no universe in which there 
is not ample space for evil personalities, transcend- 

^ Varieties of Religious Experience, by Prof. W. James, pp. 
525, 526. 



i8o GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

ing human beings, yet immanent in them; and 
so from another side we are led to think that 
there is nothing unreasonable or superstitious in 
accepting such a belief in the existence and 
working of an Evil World, and even of an evil 
hierarchy, as the words and acts of Jesus, under- 
stood in their plain sense, involve. If he did not 
teach this he used the current doctrine of the devil 
to teach a more terrible spiritual truth, a truth 
which we can only learn by giving the utmost heed 
to the parable. 



CHAPTER II 

THE SCORN OF SUPERSTITION 

There Is a prevalent opinion that the modern 
man, having before his eyes the triumph of the 
scientific method, knows how to apply the word 
"superstition." This is the opinion ahke of the 
mihtant materiahst and the average God-fearing 
man. How easily do we moderns class together 
bygone theories of the possibilities of mind and 
matter, — astrology, alchemy, magic, and the like, 
— and whenever we find a supposed trace of them 
in the common mind at present we call it 
"superstition." In so doing we show a lack of 
that necessary element of a good modern educa- 
tion, the sense of the historic continuity and 
oneness of the racial mind. This would show 
us that we are only the product of our fathers, 
made of the same matter and spirit as those who 
peopled the plain of Edinu and chronicled in the 
old story the passionate fear that the increase of 
knowledge would cause a rupture with God. 
Their knowledge was only comparative, so is 
ours; their opinions were immature, so are ours. 
We find in ourselves their religious antagonisms, 

i8i 



i82 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

faith calling knowledge demoniacal, and knowledge 
calling the search after spirit in all things, 
superstitious. We also inherit from those we 
have called antediluvian the tendency to think 
that we live in the end of time, that upon us the 
ends of the world are come; by direct inheritance 
from every generation of which we have any 
record we come by the idea that we of the latest 
half century have acquired the secret of the world ! 

The effort after the unknown, the search for 
spiritual power, has always existed; we call the 
earlier forms of it "superstition"; and the reason 
why these earlier forms of faith appear to us more 
absurd than they are is that we do not grasp 
the reality in them. We find in old religious 
liturgies many sorts of impetuous intellectual 
effort combined — imagination, religion, the power 
of reasoning and observation of fact, all confused. 
To-day we have differentiated; we try to dis- 
tinguish between the functions of poetry, priest- 
hood, theology, and science. But in those high 
civilisations that flourished before Israel became 
a nation the man with a religious vocation must 
needs be poet, scientist, theologian, medicine man, 
and priest. As man of science he compiled 
incantations which embodied his observations on 
disease and misfortune; as priest he edited and 
repeated liturgies; and we find the poetry, the 
piety, the material knowledge of the time, con- 
fused together. 

Superstition often appears to differ from poetry 
only by the degree in which those who speak 
in figures perceive the difference between what 



CH. II THE SCORN OF SUPERSTITION 183 

they speak of and the figure in which they clothe 
it. Keeping this distinction in mind we shall 
perceive that in many of its historic beliefs the 
racial mind has expressed itself in figures by that 
power of natural imagery which is the very mint 
in which our words are coined, and then by 
degrees has fallen to worshipping the letter 
which kills, producing thus a gross superstition 
which a little later it discards as ancestral folly, 
and in the resulting effort to think for itself the 
racial mind again finds its most ancient thought 
returning in the disguise of a new discovery. 

Taking, for example, man's idea of God, we 
find that it has gone through such transitions. 
God spoke; God stretched forth his hand; God 
walked in the garden; God drew his bow; God 
wielded his sword : God appeared in fire and 
cloud. How far the first efforts of man to 
express what he knew to be invisible, what he 
felt to be transcendent, were literal or figurative 
we cannot tell, for he himself had no distinction 
between letter and figure; all his letters were 
figures. But since he was aware that the sounds 
by which he denoted earthly things denoted really 
some name of his own conferred on the things, 
and not the things themselves, — and the figurative 
nature of the earliest language has been abundantly 
proved to us, — we have little foundation for the 
accusation that when he first coined phrases to 
express invisible power he was deceived by them. 
But as the letter became more and more sacred, 
the common mind fell into the ruts of common 
thought, and handed on from generation to 



i84 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

generation superstitions which the seer — prophet 
or priest or poet — was for ever warring against 
and never vanquishing. Perhaps the latest phase 
of this long battle is its best illustration, because 
it is the one most familiar to us. How necessary 
and desirable in the course of last century was 
the sceptical protest against a very small and 
crude explanation of the doctrine of the Trinity, 
and the "plan of salvation" then rife! The 
most lovely and gracious figures of Hebrew 
poetry, of the parables of Jesus, of the Christian 
mystics, or Christian poets had become to the 
common religious mind like the dolls or tin 
soldiers of a nursery play-box, and were set out 
and made to go through their paces in the 
homilies of almost every Catholic and Protestant 
divine. Science had opened up illimitable regions 
never before discerned. We looked for the first 
time down the immeasurable ages of our geological 
past, and peered into a future measured only by 
the slow cooling of the sun; we saw into the 
depths of the universe as it floated across the 
strongest telescope, measuring its space by the 
transmission of light, and into the infinite grada- 
tions of perfect organisms which the strongest 
microscope disclosed. Was it any wonder that 
the Power which could perfect the irides- 
cence on the wing of an insect too small for 
the natural eye, which could shepherd the whirl 
of suns whose light when it reached us had left 
them a century before, which had brought all 
things into existence by the millennial processes 
of evolution, — was it any wonder that such a 



CH. II THE SCORN OF SUPERSTITION 185 

Power appeared to be most inadequately described 
in a literal acceptance of the machinery of Dante 
or Milton, by the theologies of Wesley or 
Newman or Jonathan Edwards ? Even "the sin- 
less years that breathed beneath the Syrian blue" 
appeared to have but an unimportant connection 
with the Creator and Sustainer of the new 
immensities of creation. To the Unitarian the 
idea of the infinite fostering love of a Creator 
seemed belittled by the doctrine of the Incarnation; 
to the Scientist the idea of infinite force seemed 
the most adequate to express ultimate reality; 
and from both standpoints the minds of many 
easily escaped into the idea that any suggestion 
of personality was belittling to God, that it was 
more reverent, as well as more appropriate, to 
conceive God in terms of force, or by means of 
infinite attributes, in so far as we conceived him 
at all. These were large ideas; they carried 
one generation of thinkers into an airy place 
where they could turn and think with fine scorn 
of all they called "anthropomorphic religion." 
But soon came revulsion from that first boyish 
materialism of scientific progress, and men of 
science were carried back in the direction of 
idealism, reverting. to thought instead of sense 
as the basis of knowledge; while the religious 
thought of those who had never bowed the knee 
to materialism, leaving those things that were 
behind and pressing forward, as thought always 
must in trying to discover wherein for man 
reality consists, found it only within the self; and 
with this general change of philosophic attitude 



i86 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

came a fresh reverence for the manifestation of 
God as a Person. 

The only reahty which man cannot think away, 
the only force which he cannot conceive in terms 
of weight or measure, is personahty. All else of 
which we can think, such as matter, force, life, in 
any sense in which we can conceive them, can, 
now one, now another, in thought be measured 
and eliminated at will; the thought that measures 
and eliminates remains, an unmeasurable power. 
The thought, its way of directing itself, its way 
of impressing itself, is personality. The only 
personality that comes within the range of reasoned 
knowledge is human; the existence of God is an 
inference of faith; and we attribute to him our 
conception of this ultimate reality. Of infinity 
and all its attributes we can have no conception, 
although we image to ourselves the huge or the 
interpenetrating or the irresistible; but it is a 
dangerous business to bow down to mere images of 
anything in heaven above or in the earth beneath, 
even magnified by our conception of infinity. 
Our only real choice lies between attributing to 
God either one set of personal attributes or 
another; and all who admit that in the character 
of Jesus we have the ideal human personality 
must attribute that character to God. 

To sketch, even as slightly as in the foregoing 
paragraph we have sketched, the history of the 
notion of God, the many beliefs that have under- 
gone similar transitions, would take too long; but 
let us pass to that fantastic "superstition" with 
which we are immediately concerned, which ascribed 



CH. II THE SCORN OF SUPERSTITION 187 

all disease in men and animals to the intrusion and 
indwelling of certain mischievous entities that 
we call demons. We are all familiar with the 
absurdities of demonology, and the magical rites 
that were used as prevention and cure. When 
we roam at large among all these strange fancies, 
we find, among much that seems senseless, some 
significant facts. The forefathers of our intellect, 
they who made the alphabets of all our learning, 
thought that the disease-demons frequented solitary 
places and dry places — the solitudes of the Eastern 
desert.^ Picture these places, — desert highways 
often strewn with the slaughter of the sun which 
strikes at mid-day, or waterless caverns, where the 
beasts, seeking shade and hiding, lie down to die, 
or stony rock-ledges of the mountains which men 
chose for tombs. In such places, when the wind 
raised the dust-cloud, it was dangerous to go far. 
A demon passing in the air and striking against a 
man had no choice but to enter in and multiply 
within him.^ After being in such a place a man 
must perform ablutions as well as say his prayers, 
for the demons of dry places hated water. ^ Or 

^ "The plague demon in the desert hke a cloud of dust makes 
his way . . . though he hath neither hands nor feet, ever goes 
round and round." Translation of magical text, Appendix III., 
Sayce's Hihhert Lectures, p. 477. 

^ "The demons stumble upon their victims, as it were, and 

strike whomsoever they happen to encounter." (From Maklu 

series of tablets quoted by M. Jastrow Jr., in art. "Religion of 

Babylonia"; see extra vol. of Hastings's Dictionary of the Bible.) 

^ I have washed my hands, cleansed my body, 

With the pure waters of a source that arises in Eridu. 

Whatever is evil, whatever is not good. 

That is lodged in my body, in my flesh, in my limbs. (Ibid.) 



i88 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

again, in deep shades of forests the disease-demons 
were rife, especially at sunset or at dew-fall and 
until the sunrise. Crowded market or inn was a 
place of danger. These demons could enter into 
a man with the air he breathed, with the water or 
milk he drank, or with the meat he ate.^ One 
human being could infect another with them by 
breath, by spittle, or by the presence necessary for 
a mere look.^ Especially was the embrace of the 
harlot-witch dangerous, the wound of a bull's horn, 
or the bite of an animal. The dog kind, the serpent 
kind, or — let us note — the mosquito kind, were 
more apt than others to convey the disease- 
demon. 

There were many full-blown fancies about the 
monstrous appearance of these demons, such 
fancies as always gather about the invisible; or 
about their nature, as that they were the souls of 
dead men; but from the sum of all the incanta- 
tions against them we gather that these imaginative 
additions to the doctrine had no general authority. 
No shape or size is really attributed to disease- 
demons, for they could dwell in hand or foot or 
eye, nay, they could multiply and swarm in any 

^ "All sickness was ascribed to demoniacal possession; the 
demon had been eaten with the food and drunk with the water, 
or breathed in with the air, and until he could be expelled there 
was no chance of recovery." (Sayce's Hibhert Lectures, Lect. 
IV., p. 310. See also Lect. V., p. 330.) 

^ "The ^vitch's spittle is poisonous, and can torture one on 
whom it falls or whoever treads on it." (M. Jastrow in art. 
"Religion of Babylonia," in extra vol. of Hastings's Dictionary 
of the Bible.) 



CH. II THE SCORN OF SUPERSTITION 189 

member of the body, and they could be drawn out 
by way of the nose or the mouth/ 

These behefs concerning disease-demons seem 
to have prevailed from all time ; in the ages before 
the patriarchs they were well developed. They 
continued to be prevalent in Christendom till the 
period of the Reformation, and then still prevailed 
among the unlettered, knowing no distinction of 
Protestant or Papist. Then, as we know, came 
a period of great light, when among the learned 
no superstition appeared so paltry as that attribut- 
ing diseases to invisible living creatures which 
could be inhaled with the air, or drunk or eaten, 
which entered into men from the dry dust as it 
rode on the wind, or from the bite of creatures 
that fly or creep in the night. But Heaven did 
not permit men a long interval of such dry light, 
for the tale of the disease-demons soon issued 
again from the very places whence it had first been 
cast out with contumely — from the laboratory 
and the library. We may further remark that 
the popular imagination concerning the germs of 
disease is still as remote from the actual facts 
revealed by the microscope as if it still clothed 
them in the anthropomorphic language of uncon- 
scious poetry; nor is the scientist any nearer an 
explanation of the mystery of the life which 
animates them and us than were the framers of 
the earliest magical incantations. 

Yet how often we have heard of the happy 

^ See Josephus, Antiquities, Book VIIL, chap. ii. 5; and for 
Jewish familiarity with Gentile demonology see Cheyne, Introd, 
to Isaiah, p. 210. 



190 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

relief from demonism that our modern enlighten- 
ment gives to the mind ! Indeed, many are so 
impressed with the importance of this relief that 
they point to religion as the evil mania which fills 
our atmosphere with terrors of the unseen. One 
of their stock objections to the gospel is what they 
call its " demonology " ; yet, as we have just seen, 
there was a great deal in the ancient belief as 
to the causes of disease which has recently been 
confirmed by the bacteriologist. Are we not now 
afraid of the dust of dry places ^ Do we not fear 
the night of malarial districts, when the gnats and 
beasts, infected by malaria, are abroad and seeking 
prey ? How could we better describe the attitude 
of man to the microbe than in these spirited lines, 
an incantation to drive away the disease-demon, 
from the fifth tablet of the Maklu series ? — 



Away, away, far away, far away. 

For shame, for shame, fly away, fly away. 

Round about face, go away, far away. 

Out of my body, away. 

Out of my body, far away. 

Out of my body, for shame. 

Out of my body, fly away. 

Out of my body, round about face. 

Out of my body, go away. 

Into my body do not return. 

To my body draw not nigh. 

To my body do not approach. 

Into my body do not force your way. 

My body torture not.^ 

^ Art. " Rehgion of Babylonia," by M. Jastrow Jr., In extra 
vol. of Hastings's Dictionary of the Bible. 



CH. II THE SCORN OF SUPERSTITION 191 

We do not believe in wizard or witch, but we 
believe in infection and contagion, which obey 
laws very similar to the supposed methods of 
witchcraft. The ancients also arrived at the 
conclusion that certain human beings had a 
peculiar power of infecting their neighbours with 
demons; just as to-day, if we had no idea of 
the laws that govern infection and contagion, 
we might suppose, after careful observation, that 
people suffering from infectious or contagious 
disease, and able to go about, were endowed with 
a spiritual power of doing mischief to their neigh- 
bours. Can we find a better description of one 
going about in the last feverish stage of tubercular 
disease than the following lines from the third 
tablet of the same series ? — 

Who art thou, witch, 

Who carries the word of my misfortune in her heart, 

Whose tongue brings about my destruction, 

Through whose hps I am poisoned, 

In whose footsteps death follows ? ^ 

The whole theory of demoniacal possession was 
historically a survival of primitive animism ; so is 
our theory of God and of immortality, of justice 
and of mercy. All these had their almost indis- 
tinguishable beginnings in the earliest progressive 
religion of which we can find any trace; all these 
lie like unused, atrophied organs within the most 
decadent religions we can investigate. That a 
belief is a survival of animism does not prove it 

^ Art. "Religion of Babylonia," by M. Jastrow Jr., in extra 
vol. of Hastings's Dictionary of the Bible. 



192 GOD'S CITADEL OX EARTH book m 

false; but the fancies of animism prove how prone 
human nature is to invest anv power that it does 
not understand with fantastic attributes. Indeed, 
at the present day there is a rapidly growing 
imagination concerning the deadly nature of 
disease germs, which makes them loom large out 
of all proportion to other facts of life, and bids fair 
to be a superstition as paralysing as any that 
troubled the ancient world. The case of the 
wretched city clerk who was starving because he 
had dispensed with almost every article of diet, 
fearful lest each in turn might be infected by 
noxious germs, is not a worse instance of exagger- 
ated fancies that amount to superstition than is 
that of the millionaire who isolated his children 
from all wholesome companionship for fear of 
infection. To such men the microbe is a veritable 
monster. Such terrors give rise to imaginary 
shapes of undue proportion; stern truth can 
make small headway against them when popular; 
the best antidote is a rival imagery of quack 
medicines and patent germicides, by exaggeration 
equally false to fact. 

Many superstitions mav be effete, but we are 
not yet able completely to distinguish between the 
follies and the true insight of our ancestors. 
IVIuch that we have sometimes thought divine 
revelation has proved with larger knowledge to be 
puerile;^ much that we think puerile may prove 
our wisdom. Since we have found the equivalent 
of disease-demons in the microcosms that cause so 
many of our bodilv ailments, we should do well to 

^ E.g., Regulations concerning the Hebrew taboo. 



CH. II THE SCORN OF SUPERSTITION 193 

realise that the ghb statement that demoniacal 
possession was a mere fancy, is not a sign of great 
scholarship or great wisdom. Suspense of judg- 
ment is the wiser attitude toward the belief, so 
long held by the world-mind, that afflictions of 
the spirit may be caused by some external spiritual 
influence. 

Let us not be misunderstood. All the facts 
of experience — so-called material facts, so-called 
mental facts — alike have to be accounted for in 
the philosophy of every inquiring mind. Accord- 
ing to a man's ultimate assumptions will be the 
explanation that satisfies him. Naturalism, whose 
postulate is that physical phenomena are our 
primary facts, traces physical sequences of cause 
and effect, and from its point of view any fact is 
"explained" when its place is assigned in such a 
sequence. The physicist seeks no further explana- 
tion, for he has found all he started to find. The 
psychologist, in the same scientific spirit, studies 
the facts of mind; he perceives their strict 
correlation with physical facts ; but he may decide, 
as our leading English psychologist ^ does, that he 
cannot resolve the sequence of mental facts into 
the physical sequence, and regard the one as the 
mere collateral product of the other. Then he is 
driven to ask the question, "May it not be that 
the physicist deals only with the utterances of 
what we may call the insides of things V ^ Is 
not the mechanical explanation of the world an 
abstraction from the actual world in which we live 

^ Dr. James Ward. 
^ Naturalism and Agno:iti(ism, by Dr. Ward, vol. ii. p. 8i- 
o 



194 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

and struggle ? The inquirer who reaches this point 
may proceed to postulate mind as the prior and 
fundamental reality. Starting from that postu- 
late he sees that "the material and mechanical 
is not fundamental, but that the teleological and 
spiritual underlie it and are pre-supposed by it/' ^ 
With his idealistic hypothesis he views the facts of 
experience in another light. He does not deny 
the physicist's knowledge so far as it goes, but he 
starts with an assumption that enables him, as he 
conceives, to understand the facts of experience 
more completely, to give a deeper explanation 
of them. 

Let us suppose that speculative philosophy and 
practical religion push a man to postulate, not 
merely intelligence but a Supreme Intelligence, as 
the only sufficient reason of creation; and suppose 
him further to find that experience, the source of 
all knowledge, points to the existence of an evil 
principle, subordinate no doubt to the Supreme 
Will, yet able to will, and to act on the human 
mind, in contravention of the Supreme Will; such 
hypothesis will give him a new standpoint from 
which to view the facts of experience, but it will 
not lead him to contradict or deny the physical 
explanation of experience, or the other and ad- 
ditional explanation offered by the philosopher who 
insists on the prior reality of mind. Our inquirer 
is unable to find any account of the facts of 
existence satisfying to himself unless he postulate 
something other than they can teach him as to the 
nature of supreme reality. His difference with the 

' /^/W. p. 253. 



CH. II THE SCORN OF SUPERSTITION 195 

mere physicist does not lead him to deny that the 
physicist has any explanation to ofFer; there can 
be no question that every fact of experience can 
have its physical cause and consequence pointed 
out. Much less does it lead him to deny the 
idealist philosophy. The question for him is 
whether these truths are the most satisfactory 
explanation he can reach. 

To return, what do we know about demoniacal 
possession .? Body we know, and the disease-germs 
of the body we know; functional disorders or 
organic changes we know to be the concomitants 
of all nervous or mental troubles. Mind apart 
from body we do not know; we do not know 
what influences of outer spirit may work upon 
incarnate spirit, and be the cause of those so-called 
hysterical disorders affecting the moral and spiritual 
nature for which the religious mind hardly finds 
adequate cause in brain or nerve. Our conten- 
tion is that the hypothesis which Jesus seemed to 
countenance in explanation has nothing incredible 
in it. 

We have certainly made progress in knowledge. 
Every one who believes that good lies at the heart 
of things must believe that this progress is real 
and, even if chequered, will be continuous. At 
the same time we know that at the beginning 
and at the end of every known sequence of fact 
or thought lies the unknown. Different epochs 
produce different theories with regard to the 
borderlands of knowledge ; farther off there is not 
even theory to support thought. It is only those 
who lack the power to learn from history who 



196 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

think that the tendency of thought for one age, 
although pointing for some time in one direction, 
necessarily points to finality. Our progress is 
rather to be observed in the ceaseless shifting of 
opposing races and schools. The progress of our 
knowledge is like an apocalyptic vision; always, 
everywhere, we have doctrine warring against 
doctrine and theory against theory, men's hearts 
failing them because the very foundations of their 
thought are shaken. In the gloom of each conflict 
to some God seems gone from heaven; the periodic 
pulse of things, by which order is held out of chaos, 
beats low, and parts of knowledge that seemed as 
steadfast as the stars in the firmament are lost. 
That which emerges out of the din and darkness 
is the wiser man, not with higher powers but with 
wider opportunity. He knows that if he goes 
backward he fails. He must press forward; yet, 
as he goes, something in the creeds that he thinks 
to be dead rises and meets him after many days, 
like a child advancing from the dawn of the 
morning. 



CHAPTER III 



THE PERMANENT NEED OF ' EXORCISM' 



Jesus gave a large part of his ministry to the 
restoration of free will in those to whom it was 
lost. He chose to restore self-control to reputed 
demoniacs, not as he healed those suffering from 
other diseases, but by addressing, or appearing to 
address, some extraneous spiritual entity within 
them. They had lost self-control, and he could 
not ask them for personal faith; but why should 
he not have restored them to self-possession as he 
restored the dead to life, without assuming the 
position of the exorcist .? It is the apparent 
assumption by Jesus of this role, his apparent 
acceptance of the current belief that the indwelling 
demons were living subjects of the kingdom of 
evil, that marks off these marvels of healing as a 
distinct class. 

Several theories are advanced to account for 
the action of Jesus. One theory would admit that 
possession by demons was real in those times, but 
would say it was local and temporary. We may 
dismiss this view as intolerable. Whatever was 
the cause of diseases affecting the volitional power 

197 



198 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

then must be the cause of them now. The forms 
of our diseases change with our conditions — e.g.^ 
the Black Plague common in the past was a worse 
scourge than influenza; but no such extraordinary 
change has come over the race as that epidemics 
might be caused by intrusive disease-germs at one 
period in man's history, and be independent of any 
disease-germ in another period. In the same 
way, there is certainly no such radical difference 
in human conditions as to make possible so extra- 
ordinary and so enormous a change as this — that 
control of the human will should in the first 
century have been assumed at times by a foreign 
and mischievous will belonging to some low form 
of spirit life, and in the twentieth century men 
should be liable to no such accidents. 

Another theory is that God, having put on our 
flesh and its attendant circumstance, also accepted 
the ignorance and superstition of his age, and 
believed in an arch-devil and in minor demons 
because his neighbours did, and not because such 
ideas represented truth. Whether Jesus accepted 
the limitations of his age in mundane matters it is 
of less importance for us to decide; but if he had 
no higher degree of insight than others into the 
unseen world we can only learn from him as from 
any other great ethical teacher. All mystics claim 
direct intuitive knowledge of the spirit world ; and 
if Jesus has anything to impart to us which we 
could not discover for ourselves from physical fact 
and reasoned induction, he must have it by in- 
tuitive cognisance of the conditions of our spiritual 
life. 



CHAP. Ill NEED OF ^EXORCISM' 199 

Another view seems to be that Jesus addressed 
the demon because that was the only method that 
carried conviction of the cure to minds convinced 
of the reahty of demon possession. We take a 
passagefromProf. Harnack's What is Christianity? 
which countenances this view : — 

"The notion of people being 'possessed' was 
current everywhere ; nay, even the science of the 
time looked upon a whole section of morbid 
phenomena in this light. But the consequence of 
these phenomena being explained as meaning that 
some evil and invisible power had taken possession 
of a man, was that mental affections took forms 
which looked as if an alien being had really entered 
into the soul. There is nothing paradoxical in 
this. If modern science were to declare nervous 
disease to consist, in great part, of 'possession,' 
and the newspapers were to spread this announce- 
ment amongst the public, the same thing would 
recur. We should soon have numerous cases in 
which nervous patients looked as if they were in 
the grip of an evil spirit, and themselves believed 
that they were so. . . . The best means of 
encountering these forms of mental disease is 
to-day, as it was formerly, the influence of a 
strong personality. It is able to threaten and 
subdue the 'devil,' and so heal the patient." ^ 

We would suggest that to make the belief of 
the patient that he was possessed by an alien 
spirit the essential characteristic of those cases 
treated by Jesus as demoniacal, is untrue to the 
record. Our Lord appears to have used a com- 

^ What is Christianity f pp. 60, 61. 



200 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

mand to the alien spirit as the means of cure in 
cases of children and maniacs, where one cannot 
suppose the patient to have been capable of hold- 
ing any theory about his own affliction. When 
Jesus said to the Syrophenician, "The devil is 
gone out of thy daughter," he did not use that 
expression for the sake of impressing the daughter. 
Further, to suppose an hallucination on the part 
of the patient and his friends to lie at the root of 
the question, and to be the only reason of the 
method used by Jesus in treating hysterical dis- 
orders, is, in the face of all we know of such 
disorders, a superficial view. As a matter of fact, 
we know that all through human history man has 
been liable to all sorts of nervous or hysterical 
compulsions, of which the essential characteristic 
is loss of self-control, not, and most emphatically 
not, his knowledge that self-control has been lost. 

Jesus found in the men of his time many 
beliefs concerning the spirit-world and man's 
relation to it. To some of these beliefs he set 
the seal of his authority; some he set aside as 
negligible; some he denied. He certainly taught 
much less concerning this adjacent world than 
most people suppose. There are but two reverent 
and rational explanations of his attitude to the 
demonology of his time. Either he must have 
wished to endorse as truth such part of the popular 
belief as he incorporated into his own ministry, or 
he must have used it as a parable to convey a truth 
concerning the loss of volitional freedom that was 
of the utmost importance for us to learn. 

It is worth while to study carefully the belief 



CHAP. Ill NEED OF ^EXORCISM' 201 

in possession as countenanced by Jesus. His 
belief in demoniacal possession has nothing in 
common with the modern superstitions which 
accrete themselves round such terms as "ghosts," 
"spirit control," "poltergeist," etc. We have no 
need to think of shades hovering in the air. Two 
salient features in the attitude of Jesus contrast 
with many notions we have been accustomed to 
associate with it. First, he seems to have attached 
no moral blame to the condition of being demon- 
ised ; his words concerning certain physical diseases 
may possibly imply that they were brought on by 
sin, but there is no suggestion of this in his 
dealing with the poor wretches whom by exorcism 
he set free as from a degrading servitude. The 
second point is that he gives no colour to the idea 
that the demons had human personality. It is 
true that when he cured these cases he never 
spoke to the sufferer; he commanded the demon; 
so that, if his action is not a parable, there is 
evidence that he thought he perceived an indwell- 
ing spirit with so much of intelligence that it 
could obey a command. But we can command 
many animals by word or by mere presence; we 
do not therefore suppose them to have the 
attributes of human personality. That he re- 
garded demons as impersonal must be obvious to 
those who mark with what dignity our Lord 
invested the human spirit, either saved or lost, 
and what indignity he meted out to demons. All 
that is necessarily implied in the method of Jesus 
in these cases is that there are low forms of spirit- 
life capable of some degree of intelligence and 



202 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH p.ook m 

volition, able to attack and injure the powers of 
the human spirit, as a germ of physical disease 
may, with or without their concomitance, attack 
and injure the powers of the human body. 

In the facts of life before us there is much that 
appears to harmonise with such a belief. There is 
an analogy between the infectious diseases of the 
body and those nervous affections which impair 
self-control but stop short of insanity proper. Just 
as the bacterial germ passes from body to body, 
spreading physical disease, so does a malign spirit 
seem to pass from mind to mind and even from 
animal to human mind. Nervous diseases are 
always catching and often epidemic. They have 
produced the worst epidemics the world has 
known. Just as bodily diseases are rife when 
human beings live in close air, dirt, and want of 
healthy exercise; so when they live in ignorance, 
moral turpitude, and lack of intellectual interests, 
do mental ailments prevail; and this is the effect 
even when every physical advantage is possessed. 

Let us cite a few of these mental epidemics. 

There is what is called "The Children's 
Crusade." 

"In whole large districts of Europe young 
children, who belonged to a generation born when 
the population had been decimated by the Cru- 
sades, rushed from the towns in troops, and, join- 
ing others on the highways, marched day after day, 
they knew not where or why, but, as they said, 
bound for Jerusalem. They begged their food as 
they passed, but would be controlled by no one. 
The King of France issued a personal edict to the 



CHAP. Ill NEED OF ^EXORCISM' 203 

children, but neither in France nor Germany could 
the epidemic be allayed. Persuasions, threats, 
punishments, were as futile as the king's com- 
mand. Bolts and bars could not hold the children. 
If shut up, they broke through doors and windows, 
and rushed to take their places in the processions 
which they saw passing by. If the children were 
detained so that escape was impossible they pined 
away. 

We know how far they went, and in what 
numbers, and to what destruction. Neither the 
physical nor psychological explanations, although 
true as far as they go, seem to exhaust the 
matter. 

Take, again, the crusade against the Albigenses : 

"According to Albert von Stade, a peculiar 
religious mania broke out among women; thou- 
sands of them, stark naked and in deep silence, as 
if stricken with dumbness, ran frantically about the 
streets. In Luttich many of them fell into con- 
vulsions of ecstasy.'^ ^ 

The epidemic which offers an apparent refuta- 
tion of Professor Harnack's argument is the 
mania of witchcraft, a mental fever which raged 
in Europe for almost two centuries. In this 
mania we see the sort of possession which 
Professor Harnach has in mind — hundreds of 
people of all ages and classes, accused of being 
possessed with devils, usually coming to believe 
that they were so possessed, confessing to 
possession, and acting in accordance with the 

^ The Psychology of Suggestion^ by Boris Sidis, p. 324. 
2 IbiJ. p. 323. 



204 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

belief. But these victims of persecution were 
few compared with the tens of thousands of other- 
wise sane men and women who, not knowing 
themselves possessed, were really under the mad 
compulsion of bringing such accusations, of hunt- 
ing out, torturing, and burning innocent victims. 

"The terror of mysterious evil agencies fell on 
the spirits of men. The demon of fear seemed 
to have obsessed the mind of European humanity. 
Continental Europe, especially France, Germany, 
and Switzerland, suffered greatly from the 
epidemic. . . . High and low were attacked by the 
malady without any discrimination. In fact, the 
more learned one was the stronger was the malady, 
the more acute was the fear of inimical mysterious 
agencies. One can hardly find in the records of 
human crime anything more disgusting, more 
infamous, than this insane systematic persecution 
of feeble women and tender children. . . . The 
spirit of persecution did not spare even the little 
ones. The number of children on the list is 
great. . . . On American ground we find, on the 
accusation of a few hysterical girls, twenty 
innocent persons condemned to death." ^ 

In this instance we must perceive that the 
persecutors had all the symptoms of lack of 
self-possession, with no consciousness of being 
possessed. 

It would be easy to multiply instances and 
shocking descriptions of such "possession." We 
here cite but one more — a description of excite- 
ment at American revivals in the last century : — 

^ The Psychology of Suggestion, by Boris Sidis, pp. 339, 341, 342. 



CHAP. Ill NEED OF 'EXORCISM' 205 

"In many places the religious epidemic took 
the form of laughing, dancing, and barking or 
dog manias. Whole congregations were con- 
vulsed with hysterical laughter during holy service. 
In the wild delirium of religious frenzy people 
took to dancing, and at last to barking like dogs. 
They assumed the posture of dogs, moving about 
on all fours, growling, snapping the teeth, and 
barking with such an exactness of imitation as 
to deceive any one whose eyes were not directed 
to the spot. Nor were the people who suffered 
so mortifying a transformation always of the 
vulgar classes : persons of the highest rank in 
society, men and women of cultivated minds and 
polite manners found themselves by sympathy 
reduced to this degrading situation." ^ 

Lastly, take a description of a modern financial 
crisis by an economic writer. After referring to the 
extravagant projects afterward known as the South 
Sea Bubble he says : " Every great crisis reveals 
the excessive speculations of many houses which 
commonly had not begun or had not carried very 
far those speculations, till they were tempted by 
the daily rise of prices and the surrounding fever. 
At most periods of great commercial excitement 
there is some admixture of the older kind of 
investing mania. . . . The mania of 1825 ^^^ 
the mania of 1866 were striking examples of this. 
People speculate in bubble companies and in 
worthless shares. Almost everything will be 
believed for a little while. The counters in the 
gambling mania, the shares in the companies 

* The Psychology of Suggestion, by Boris Sidis, p. 352. 



2o6 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

created to feed the mania, are discovered to be 
worthless when the reaction comes." ^ 

But indeed we do not need to go so far afield, 
or into the excitement of great epidemics, to come 
across afflictions of the human spirit w^hich have 
many svmptoms in common with cases of ''pos- 
session," although not that one symptom desid- 
erated by Professor Harnack, the belief in being 
possessed. We all know the "unhappy member" 
of the family, with whom self-consciousness and 
emotional excitement form a disease, to whom all 
passing events are distorted by uncontrolled 
egotistical emotions, w^ho, alas, from birth to 
the hour of death is a burden and a perplexity to 
relatives. Have we not here the same perplexing 
phenomenon, modified by all that education, 
medical science, and even religion, can do } 

Whether the causes of psychic phenomena are 
automatic or spiritualistic, what is called the 
"mediumistic temperament" is a fact, and prob- 
ably there is no human being who does not at 
some time experience the "mediumistic condition" 
in greater or less degree. The condition can be 
encouraged and emphasised, it can be ignored and 
minimised, while the mind is still in control. It 
has its uses as well as its abuses; but whether it 
opens the windows of the human mind to other 
tenants or not, is, so far as science goes, matter 
only for presumption, negative or affirmative. 
Alas, the borderland between self-control and the 
want of it, is wide, and by our present science 
dimly lit, full of the dread possibilities of mental 

^ Lombard Street, by Walter Bagehot, chap. vi. 



CHAP. Ill NEED OF * EXORCISM' 207 

diseases. The healthy and the superficial laugh 
at these freaks; the wisest and most deeply 
learned fear them, while at the same time they 
know that fear itself is the worst and most deadly 
enemy of health. The wise physician to-day 
regards every habit, however trivial, that indicates 
the failure of self-control, as a symptom which 
may be prolific of greater evil than the microbe 
of any organic disease; but he also knows, and 
acts upon the knowledge, that the less the subject 
of this symptom fears it, the more he ignores 
or forgets it, the more likely he is to trample it 
under foot. 

There are several types of "hysteria" proper 
with which most of us are familiar. (We use 
the foolish word " hysteria " for want of a better.) 
The first we may picture as the "demon" of 
unrest. It is seen in the individual who has 
been under some strain of work or emotion, and 
has succumbed to it so far as to lose the power 
of attention. He may be fidgety, irritable, and 
in other ways annoying; but the chief symptom 
is the fact that he cannot spend his leisure in the 
repose he so much needs, or devote to his work 
the continued, concentrated attention which would 
produce the best in quantity and quality. The 
next type is perhaps more common in women; 
we may call it the "demon" of emotional vanity. 
It is seen in an abnormal craving for sympathy 
and admiration, or for novelty. If husband, 
children, or friends remit for a day their acts of 
obvious devotion, some misfortune occurs of 
which the hysteric is the heroine, and in which 



2o8 GOD'S CITADEL OX EARTH book m 

her pathetic or heroic behaviour recalls their 
attention. If she meets with reproach, or even 
with onlv calm civilitv, she suffers all the agony 
of spirit that crueltv or insult might evoke. Men 
there are like this, but such women are unfortu- 
nately comparatively common. Again, there is 
a tvpe in which we may see the "demon" of 
instabilitv, apparent in the man or woman who 
lacks either decision or resolution. Those who 
lack the former are thrown into distress by being 
asked to decide upon a reasonable plan of action 
with which others can arrange their plans. They 
change and change about with regard to what 
they will do, and when and how they will do it, 
till the nerv'Ous force of all concerned is exhausted, 
and onlv emergency pushes them to action. The 
other varietv are as full of decisions as an egg is 
full of meat. They are alwavs embarking on some 
course of action, and are deeplv offended when 
others will not join them; but thev are not able 
to adhere to anv plan for more than a short time. 
The worst of all, perhaps, is the "demon" of 
jealousv, too well known to need description. 
All these tvpes can be seen in a more blatant but 
more elemental form in the youth of both sexes : 
we have the girl who is alwavs ill when she 
does not want to do something, and alwavs 
well when she does; the vouth who is always 
idle, vet always indulging large intentions of am- 
bitious work, and manv other varieties, including 
those classified as melancholia, fanaticism, etc., 
nervous afflictions which are, if possible, more 
afflicting to the onlookers than to the patient, 



CHAP. Ill NEED OF * EXORCISM' 209 

and which have in common this, that they all 
seem to be not diseases but faults, and faults that 
would be corrected if the patient could only see 
himself as others see him. The more carefully 
we watch, however, the more we realise that, 
whether or not there was an hour in the life of 
each when the fault was under control of the will, 
it has passed beyond that control, and become 
uncontrollable in a sense in which faults due to 
reasoned motives are not uncontrollable. For 
example, a man may lose his temper a thousand 
times on provocation, but if he constantly becomes 
angry without provocation he has passed over 
the border-line of normal self-control. Or a 
woman may frequently tell lies in order to pro- 
duce the desired impression, but when she 
cannot describe any incident without displaying 
herself as being admired, or suffering neglect, 
there is something other than a moral fault to be 
combated. 

Good conditions have done much, have made 
the modern hysteric a less violent, less convulsive, 
less noticeable person than the hysteric of less 
civilised conditions. Just as the most revolting 
bodily diseases have given place to milder forms, 
so the hysteric of to-day is more sedate, apparently 
more rational, than even the person who indulged 
in the fainting fits and shrieking fits described in 
the literature of the eighteenth century. That 
century in its turn displays a more moderate form 
than is seen in the convulsions and manias of the 
Dark Ages. But are these poor creatures nowa- 
days less unhappy .? Do they create less un- 



210 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

happiness ? Have we come any nearer than did 
the ancients to understanding the cause of mental 
compulsions, or as near to their cure ? 

Whether Jesus believed in demoniacal possession, 
or used it as a parable to teach a more profound 
truth, is not essential. The lesson is plain. It is 
medical science — all honour to it — that is now 
forcing the first elements of this lesson upon the 
attention of the Church. The hysteric is not able 
to cure himself. To oppose bis actions is to 
increase his unreasonable excitements; to yield to 
his every whim is as harmful. His malady has a 
moral element in it, but he is rarely to blame for 
contracting it; he has more control over his will 
than he exercises, but to treat him as a wilful 
sinner is worse than useless. All such disorders 
are accompanied by some abnormal physical change 
in the body — the disorder of some nerve centre or 
congestion of some portion of the brain — which 
from the physician's point of view^ is their cause. 
The doctor tries his medical treatment first. 
When it is, as it most often is, in vain, most 
doctors will admit that what they call the physical 
cause can only be cured, if at all, by some 
powerful and external stimulant to the patient's 
mind. Cures by such means are rare, but are well 
authenticated and not in any way miraculous. 
The only hope, the doctors tell us, for the 
majority of hysterical patients is that they may 
come in contact with some strong mental alterative 
— a commanding personality, an overpowering 
emotion, or an urgent practical necessity, which 
may com.pel them into reasoned and definite 



CHAP. Ill NEED OF 'EXORCISM' 211 

courses of action and in so doing restore to them 
the power of self-direction. But alas, these same 
doctors agree that for one case that is cured, 
hundreds and thousands remain uncured, a source 
of mischief in every society and of constant pain 
in almost every domestic circle. 

It is not — as some modern v^riters v^ould assure 
us — the belief that these most miserable maladies 
are wrought by unseen powers of evil that makes 
life gloomy, but the fact that such maladies exist, 
and that they are common, and that medecine 
knows no cure for them. By endorsing the popular 
belief in demoniacal possession, or by using it as 
a parable, Jesus taught — with the modern doctor — 
that there was no use in wasting words with the 
patient or in expecting faith and obedience from 
the "possessed," He called to their relief the 
family and the Church. He demanded faith first 
from the interceding friend. "O woman, great is 
thy faith; the demon is gone out of thy daughter." 
And the same with the father of the epileptic boy. 
He demanded most faith from the representatives 
of his kingdom — the would-be exorcists of his 
infant Church. From them he demanded great 
faith and prayer. He said, by his own ministry 
as an exorcist, "Here is a terrible evil, which is 
directly opposed to God's will and man's welfare; 
and it must be faced and abolished by men who 
will lend themselves as instruments to God's will." 
No magic was required; God's intention was 
certain, his power indubitable, the result of fearless 
faith invariable. Before any man — one of the 
Twelve, one of the Seventy, one of the sons of the 



212 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

Pharisees — before any man who lent himself to be 
the finger of God for the purpose, this evil would 
vanish. 

One great part of the joy of Jesus' gospel is this, 
that he offers for the loss of self-control prompt 
restoration, the reception of which does not require 
any curious knowledge as to the cause of the ill. 
When man cannot manage himself, has indeed no 
power to begin to free himself, Jesus by his whole 
ministry proclaimed that it was the will of God to 
set him free, not by any slow process of self-help 
combined with the help of the divine spirit, — that 
may be the way of salvation for those who have 
the normal power of choice, — but at once and 
unconditionally. When a man was not his own 
m.aster, Jesus, as representing God, set him free to 
exercise that power of choice which, as we have 
seen, being the only means of his salvation, is 
worth all else to God. So large a part of the life 
of Jesus consists in these acts of restoring volitional 
power that to neglect his teaching concerning them 
is an atrophy of faith. 

Salvation means the direction of the whole 
concrete life in accordance with the law of love to 
God and man. Unfettered power of self-direction 
by no means ensures this result, else would the 
works of mental healing have been all that the 
spirit of man required from the Saviour of the 
world. But salvation can come only to a man 
with a normal power of self-direction. Hence 
this power was the primary gift of Jesus, as it is 
the primary necessity of every individual. When- 
ever men had will-power Jesus did not coerce it, 



CHAP, m NEED OF 'EXORCISM' 213 

even to prevent its worst abuse, but when they 
had lost it he gave it back to them. 

The joy and hope of the Christian revelation 
concerning the slavery of the will has long been 
so diminished as to be scarce recognisable; and 
when here and there throughout the Christian ages 
bursts of popular enthusiasm have occurred, in 
which men have cast their chains behind them and 
believed practically in the God who in the realm 
of individual personality is always ready to make 
all things new, they have, by the greater part of 
the Church, been regarded with suspicion which 
soon turned to disapproval. We cannot tell what 
would have happened to the world if at any 
time the mass of the Church had upheld by faith 
and prayer those who were bold enough to touch 
the garment of the risen Christ and be made 
whole every whit. We have no means of con- 
ceiving what a new earth would be like, for we 
have never experienced the power of a corporate 
faith in this revelation of Jesus ; but to the logical 
and non-Christian man there lies no choice between 
believing simply and naturally in the powers 
and privileges of Christian faith as taught and 
exhibited in the earthly life of Jesus, and the belief 
that the Gospels represent only a great ethical 
teacher hampered by temporary and local su- 
perstition. 

To-day we are met on all sides by a ghastly 
evil, partly moral, partly physical, to which science 
has attached no certain cause, no probable cure. 
The dictum of Tertullian, "If a man calls him- 
self a Christian and cannot expel a demon, let him 



214 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

be put to death on the spot/' sounds perhaps a 
trifle barbarous, but to the plain common sense 
of an onlooker seems, on the whole, more in- 
telligent than the attitude of the whole modern 
Church, claiming to worship Jesus and standing 
paralysed before the nameless misery caused by 
the half-nervous, half-moral, disabilities which sap 
the will-power of thousands of her children. 



CHAPTER IV 

MIND AND DISEASE 

In spite of the enormous progress of medical 
science in knowledge and skill, there is, in the 
practical application of both to the bodies of men 
or animals, little exact knowledge. Even the 
veterinary surgeon finds that the personal or in- 
dividual element in horse or dog baffles his forecast 
of cause and effect; what ought to cure, occasionally 
kills; what ought to kill, may cure. And although 
we may call these variations rare, yet when we 
contrast their recurrence with the certain results 
we can obtain when we work upon inanimate 
things, we are forced to perceive that there is in 
animal vitality a factor, or perhaps many factors, 
of which we have no knowledge. 

The spread of any disease for no apparent 
reason than that it has taken hold on the popular 
fancy ought to be a subject of much more serious 
attention than it is. Physiology, bacteriology, have 
nothing to say here, nothing more, at least, than 
can be expressed by a shrug of the shoulders. 
The psychologist speaks of the force of a corporate 
idea in the neurotic origin of disease. Every one 

215 



2i6 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

concerned who has the power of reflection perceives 
that we are here deahng with an unknown some- 
thing which leaps from one man's nervous system 
to another, quite as baleful in effect, and quite 
as terrible, as any specific bacteria. To call it 
"suggestion," to say that it works by unconscious 
mind, explains little, and gives no remedy. If we 
had not the safeguarding hopes aroused by quack 
medicines, "Christian Science," and the like, 
suggestion would soon prey upon the minds of 
many in every community, a worse monster of 
the invisible air than even bacteria or the demons 
of old. 

Not long ago the world of medical science was 
moving on under the impression that the progress 
of knowledge was tending all in one direction — to 
show that health or ill-health in any part of the 
body must produce corresponding results on the 
brain and therefore on the mind. Mind as an 
origin of bodily affections was disregarded. More 
recently it has been admitted that, bodily harms 
being of two sorts, functional and organic, the 
former may be caused, and in some cases cured, 
by mental agency. Now we have a few doctors 
coming forward to claim a much larger power for 
the mental agent. Dr. A. T. Schofield's books 
make the drift of this school plain to the lay mind. 
One quotation will show that in these matters no 
finality is reached. 

"We have seen that the powers of the un- 
conscious mind over the body are well-nigh 
immeasurable; and knowing, as we now do, that 
our old division into functional and organic 



CHAP. IV MIND AND DISEASE 217 

diseases is merely the expression of our ignorance, 
and that all diseases, even hysterical, involve or- 
ganic disturbance somewhere, we are prepared to 
believe that faith and other unorthodox cures, 
putting into operation such a powerful agent as 
the unconscious mind, or, if you prefer the formula, 
*the forces of nature,' are not necessarily limited to 
so-called functional diseases at all.'' ^ 

Let us quote Dr. Paul Dubois, of the University 
of Berne, who appears to be a staunch materialist 
and determinist, and writes about educating his 
patients into a health-giving frame of mind, as one 
might speak of training the tendrils of a vine or 
the habits of a dog. 

"I have been able, in the course of a rather 
long medical career, to give up all physical and 
drug measures. Undoubtedly this purely psycho- 
therapeutic treatment is not easy. It takes an 
immense amount of time and patience, on the 
part of the patient especially, and as well on the 
part of the physician. The practitioner some- 
times grows weary of this work, and might be 
tempted to take up the easier role of prescribing 
drugs. But when one has reflected on these 
subjects, when one has seen the patients recover 
their robust health after years of suffering, and 
regain their power to work, and become brave; 
when one has seen them acting on their environ- 
ment, and transmitting their optimism to it by the 
force of contagion, then one takes courage and 
goes on with one's task, which is always to bring 
back patients to a healthy life from a triple point 

^ The Forces of Mind, pp. 1 64-5. 



2i8 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

of view — the psychic, the intellectual, and the 
moral." 1 

But these doctors stand somewhat apart. The 
point where the main body of advanced medical 
men seem to part company with the historic Gospel 
is in the distinction they make between the diseases, 
mostly functional, which they admit it is possible to 
cure by mental suggestion, and those which cause 
organic disturbance in the body, and which are 
therefore reckoned as quite beyond the reach of 
mental influence. It is better here frankly to 
recognise that there is a very great and pardonable 
anxiety abroad, lest any person of weight should 
make any public utterance which might lead those 
suffering from a morbid growth to defer the surgical 
operation, which, if promptly performed, would 
prolong or save life. It is this anxiety which 
has caused, and which partly excuses, some truly 
curious statements made by religious leaders upon 
the limited efficacy of prayer for the sick. But 
the religious mind ought to admit that while it 
may be foolish for any man to disobey his doctor 
before he experiences the perfect cure of faith, 
and while in the present low state of the corporate 
Christian faith it may often be impossible to 
obtain such cure, it ought, nevertheless, to be 
possible to discuss calmly the serious question 
whether diseases ought to be classed as curable 
or not curable by faith. 

There is a certain presumption against the 
validity of this distinction between diseases, in the 
mere fact that it has the aspect of embodying a 

^ Les Psychoneuroses, p. 345 of American translation. 



CHAP. IV MIND AND DISEASE 219 

temporary truce between the medical materialism 
rife everywhere a quarter of a century ago and the 
extreme idealism of those who opposed it. The 
place where two opposing schools halt for a time 
and try to come to terms, may be mistaken for the 
golden mean of truth, but it is seldom the same. 
In almost every controversy the side which 
possesses, on the whole, least truth, is always 
making a stand behind some temporary earthwork, 
admitting certain concessions, and saying, "Thus 
far and no further"; then after a while retreating 
again. Most of us remember that in the long 
resistance made by certain religious dogmatists to 
the doctrine of evolution, many such half-way 
stands were made which did not at all represent 
the mean of truth between two opposites. That 
medical materialism has already abandoned one 
class of ailments after another as admitting the 
mid cure, is no proof that it will be forced to a 
further retreat, but it affords a certain reasonable 
expectation that it may be so. 

Again, the absolute unity of mind and body in 
which life, as far as we know consists, makes us 
suspect the finality of the idea that, while functional 
disorders may under the right conditions be cured 
by a mental process, certain organic diseases can be 
cured only by the surgeon's knife. Suppose some 
malign germ to be at its evil work. If the blood 
be very healthy, if it circulate freely in the part 
affected, it may overcome the poisonous intruders. 
But the composition of the blood by digestive 
processes, its oxidisation, and its circulation, are 
matters in which it is admitted that the mind or 



220 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

unconscious mind, under right conditions, has large 
control. Consider the difference between a limb 
of the body as long as it remains part of the body 
and the same limb amputated. As long as any 
part of the body, however diseased, is alive it is 
animated by the life-mind, to whose power we 
are not in a position to put a final limit. Not 
long ago The Lancet, in a leading article, warned 
sufferers from cancer against wasting time in 
experimenting with new treatments — violet leaves 
and the like — till it was too late for the surgeon 
to operate with hope of success. The moral was 
pointed with the admission that, in certain cases of 
indisputable cancer, cures had come about "for 
some unknown reason" without treatment, and it 
was such unaccountable cases that lent a false 
value to certain drugs that might have been 
administered.^ Here, in the very fortress of 
surgical assurance, is an admission that must cause 
every one who reflects to perceive that if an organic 
disease ever pass away without treatment, there 
cannot be anything illogical and extravagant in the 
presumption that such diseases, as well as func- 
tional ones, may be under the control of the mind. 
There is another argument against this distinc- 
tion, arising out of the evidence that cures of 
organic diseases by faith actually take place. We 
are told, and rightly, by medical men, that there 
is no scientific proof of organic diseases being 
cured by faith. No cures of faith, whatever the 
disease, can admit of scientific test. Even if no 
doubt can attach to the diagnosis before or after 

* The Lancet, April 28, 1906. 



CHAP. IV MIND AND DISEASE 221 

the cure, it still always remains for the sceptic to 
give as the cause of the rare event some other 
condition that was coincident with the mental or 
religious effort at cure, it being impossible to 
eliminate all other conditions. But while there is 
no proof forthcoming to convince a mind which 
assumes that such cures are impossible, there is 
much evidence for the candid and intelligent in 
the personal character and impressions of people 
composing such societies as, for example, the 
Christian Alliance for faith-healing in New York. 
Its doctrines are "orthodox," of the extreme 
Evangelical cast; the writings it puts forward 
evince that wilful ignorance of many things {e.g.. 
Biblical criticism) which is usual with extremists 
of this class; but this does not alter the fact that 
its leaders and workers are sane, practical people. 
Their only means of cure is the prayer of faith; 
their only peculiar tenet, that with God all things 
are possible. They are certainly under the im- 
pression that diseases of every class are cured; 
and these impressions, taken in connection with 
their personal character, have evidential value. 
The same may be said of other such societies. 
They do not seem to seek notoriety for their works 
of healing, presumably obeying the gospel injunc- 
tions in this regard; but the present writer has 
reason to believe that their work will yield to pains- 
taking investigation such evidence as is possible in 
psychical matters for the truth of their belief. 

From the Christian point of view this matter 
is serious. The earliest traditions embodied in 
the Gospels present Jesus as curing all who came 



222 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

to him, and commissioning his servants to do the 
Hke. Here there is no distinction between diseases 
that can and cannot be cured by God on the 
condition of assured faith in the apphcant. If 
this is not part of the history of Jesus then we 
have no authentic history. There is much more 
difficulty in supposing these cures to be miraculous 
(in the scientific sense of the word) than in sup- 
posing them to be effected by a most benevolent 
energy of personal influence which persuaded 
faith and thus brought the will and thought and 
emotion of the sufferer into that degree of 
assurance which wrought health. Further, it 
would appear most incredible that Jesus should 
have given such a large part of his brief ministry 
to the curing of disease if he did not mean health, 
and the attainment of health by faith, to be an 
abiding condition of the kingdom of God on 
earth. 

To sum up. It is more difficult to believe 
that while many diseases may be cured by the 
right mental conditions, there are others over 
which such mental conditions have no influence, 
than to believe that all diseases come under the 
same natural laws, however powerless we may yet 
be to apply these laws. 

Setting aside the distinction sought to be drawn 
between functional and organic diseases as respec- 
tively curable and non-curable, we return to the 
fact that no one who has been watching the trend 
of medical thought can doubt that the importance 
of mental therapeutics is more and more clearly 
recognised by the vast majority of the profession. 



CHAP. IV MIND AND DISEASE 223 

It is almost universally acknowledged that where 
the patient has healthy will-power it must be 
called into exercise to choose healthy thoughts 
and exclude unhealthy suggestion; and where the 
will-power is feeble the most cheerful and healthy 
environment frequently fails entirely to prevent 
the patient dwelling upon the pains he has and 
fearing worse. We quote Dr. Schofield in a 
passage in which many of his fellow-doctors will 
heartily agree with him. It is upon the power of 
auto-suggestion. 

"What the patient has to do is carefully and 
systematically to saturate his brain by suggestion 
with what he wishes to be or to become. This 
can be done by speech, by thought, by sight, and 
by hearing. Here are four brain-paths, all of 
which tend to set the unconscious mind — the vis 
— to work at the process of cure." ^ 

It is worth while to pause and reflect upon 
these powers about which we are all learning 
to talk so glibly — the unconscious mind or life- 
mind which manages us and ours, and our 
occasional power and frequent powerlessness to 
direct it. Experience proves that by direct voli- 
tion the conscious will can do something, but not 
much, to arrest or assist the involuntary processes 
of brain and body; but that by directing the 
attention to this or that, the conscious will can 
do very much to control the unconscious mind 
for good or evil. We must, then, attribute to 
the conscience an increased responsibility, not 
only for the actions it can directly control, but 

^Nerves in Disorder y by Dr. Schofield, p. 123. 



224 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

for the whole well-being and atmosphere in which 
it places that far subtler and stronger power, 
the life-mind. Devotional books have made us 
familiar with this idea, but only as applied to the 
abstraction of the soul. We frequently say it is 
not what a man does but what he is, that is the 
source of his power and influence; and what he 
is, we are now taught, is the result of the way in 
which he directs his attention to external sources 
of suggestion. It thus becomes evident, not only 
that the voluntary observance of religious acts 
has a more far-reaching power over him who 
performs them than he can be consciously aware 
of, but that the beliefs and sentiments of which 
he is aware may not express the set of his being 
at any time; they can only express what he desires 
it to be. The same is true of the outward 
observance of any sentiment or principle, such as 
happy acts, kindly acts, loyal acts, and acts of 
faith in man or in God. His life-mind,^ accord- 
ing to the doctrine we have just quoted, will 
eventually become saturated with the sentiments 
he acts up to, even if at first he experiences almost 
nothing of the sentiment, and the unconscious 
life thus acted upon will become a force much 
greater than the conscious will, and will accomplish 
what that could not accomplish. In faith, in 
belief, in intention, what we suppose ourselves to 
be may not coincide with what we are. We may 
think we tacitly hold a faith which the whole set 
of our unconscious life-mind disregards, and it 
will disregard it until we put it into determined 

^We use this term in preference to "unconscious mind.'* 



CHAP. IV MIND AND DISEASE 225 

action. On this theory we can reaHse, even in 
our present crippled and feeble condition of voli- 
tion and body, that self-control would mean health, 
happiness, and goodness of an order which we can 
scarcely conceive, as we seldom meet the three 
together in any perfection. We may and must 
go on from this idea to the psychological result 
that would accrue from the mere multiplication 
of men of this sort, what the strength of their 
unconscious corporate life would be, for that also 
would become healthy, happy, and good, would 
carry them, and those who approached them, on 
in these paths with cumulative force. 

It is curious to note that many faith-healers 
imagine that they cannot recognise the direct 
"finger of God" as the instrument of health un- 
less they regard the cure as miraculous. If bodily 
health, individual and corporate, should accrue 
from the courage and joy of believing Jesus to be 
to the Church now what he was when on earth, 
such health would be as natural as the yearly 
harvest — for which we pray, for which we give 
thanks — as directly the work of the "finger of 
God" as the conversion of a sinner or the death 
of an aged saint. 



CHAPTER V 

FAITH AND THE DOCTORS 

There is a large notion abroad that science and 
faith-healing are opposed; but, in fact, the issue 
between the "mind-healer" and the medical 
profession has no more bearing upon the salvation 
of the body offered by Christ than the quarrel 
between the Church and Galileo had upon the 
revolutions of the solar system. The doctrine 
that medicine and surgery are injurious is not 
any part of the gospel. Hygiene and medicine 
must bear to the salvation of the body the same 
relation that all education in right living, and the 
machinery of law and justice, bear to the salvation 
of the soul. 

Thus, every Christian believes that sudden 
moral reformation of character is, by God's grace, 
possible and desirable; but he believes also that 
every help to virtue is at the same time neces- 
sary to the community. There is no antagonism 
between the two methods; nay more, they are 
recognised as complementary, God working in and 
through every agency for moral health as truly 
as in his more rapid work on more receptive souls. 

226 



CHAP. V FAITH AND THE DOCTORS 227 

If the most spiritually minded priests or mission 
preachers of our own day were to undertake the 
uplifting of some degraded district, they would 
believe and teach that God could and would make 
a sudden reformation possible to the most degraded 
man if he had the spiritual insight requisite to 
conversion. But, no doubt, at the same time a 
great part of their activity would be directed to 
the establishment of institutions for the prevention 
and more gradual cure of moral failure. The 
spiritual director, the schoolmaster, the gymnast, 
the librarian, the policeman, the judge, the master 
of the reformatory, the jailer, would have their 
place in the scheme of reformation. They would 
be necessary, because the kingdom of God does 
not come suddenly to a whole community. It 
spreads like leaven, grows like a plant. It requires 
human instruments for its establishment and 
culture. These agents, as far as they educate and 
help forward what is good, would be helpful even 
in the lives of those men most suddenly and most 
soundly converted; and in so far as they are 
required to cure or suppress moral disorder, they 
would be necessary because conversion depends 
upon a degree of spiritual insight which every 
man does not, perhaps cannot, exercise. 

From the Gospels we gather that bodily welfare 
likewise comes in both these ways. Whether we 
can fit it into our theories or not, the fact remains 
that human nature does not, except in a few 
instances, avail itself of the best opportunities that 
offer. People often prefer practically to refuse 
both God's direct and indirect ways of giving 



228 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

health. Man is like a household dog that for the 
most part prefers the neighbour's garbage tub to 
the most delicate morsels in the supplies of his 
master's loving providence. We are told that 
when Jesus lived on earth he healed all who came 
or were brought to him; but no one has ever 
dreamed that all the sick in Palestine came to him. 
We need to pause long in thought over that 
simple statement of St. Mark that he could do no 
mighty work in his own district; and the limita- 
tion was not in him ! If we take his works of 
healing, of which the details are given us, we 
find every degree between the word spoken at a 
distance from the patient to some intercessor full 
of faith, and a somewhat elaborate process of 
visible means. For this one the Master's presence 
is enough, for another his touch, for another 
merely the touch of his garment. From some the 
burden of sins must first be removed by forgive- 
ness, while others require the caution, "Sin no 
more lest a worse thing come upon thee." Is it 
not evident that even here, where so many received 
health suddenly, there could have been no sudden 
raising of the standard of national health .? 

Further, there is no clash between the Master's 
method and such methods of healing as were then 
in vogue. Jesus did not denounce other physicians ; 
on the contrary, he said that whatever good was 
done was by God's power. The physician then 
and now had no reason to find fault. Can we 
suppose that the "many physicians" who had 
tried and failed to heal a poor woman, could have 
been so wicked as to refuse to be glad when she 



CHAP. V FAITH AND THE DOCTORS 229 

obtained health by approaching the Christ ? Nay, 
if at the beginning she could have got it in that 
way, would they have been so ruthless as to desire 
that she should suffer many things at their hands, 
and waste her substance, before she appealed to 
him ? Certainly our brothers of the medical pro- 
fession to-day are incapable of such cruelty. They 
do not, most of them, believe that the sick can 
obtain health by spiritual contact with Jesus Christ, 
but they can have no objection to the experiment, 
and its success must rejoice every physician worthy 
of the name. They may fear precious time being 
lost in a futile experiment; but we have no reason 
to suppose that the operation of faith and the 
healing grace of God requires time on the divine 
side; and for every man its reception must be by 
the grace of faith, which ought not to cover long 
periods of indecision. The cases are very few 
where medical aid and the exercise of faith need 
be even for a day in opposition. If they are, it 
is faith that is at fault, not science. 

Every physician, however uncertain he may be 
in all matters of faith, is quite certain that he can 
only accomplish anything by co-operation with 
what he calls "nature" or "vitality." All that he 
can do is to evoke, encourage, and strengthen this 
vital force. This has been a commonplace of all 
schools of medicine since they existed. More 
recent, but now as clearly acknowledged, is the 
power of certain conscious mental tendencies to 
help in raising the vitality or lowering it, — a 
cheerful, hopeful, and serene frame of mind; an 
enthusiastic desire for health; a firm purpose to 



230 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

regain it, — all these are now freely admitted to be 
the physician's best friends, and in many cases his 
necessary allies. If religion, by a renewal of faith 
in God, should bring strong reinforcements to the 
innate vitality of the body, strong enough to keep 
the body well, or to restore it without medical aid 
when it is diseased, or to co-operate swiftly and 
surely with recognised means, this would be a 
result that every physician would hail with delight, 
whether or not he agreed with the religious view 
of the how and why of the increased vitality. It 
is a conservative religious sentiment which has 
made objection to the exercise of faith in regard 
to health, never the true scientific spirit. What 
every medical man desires for his patient is life, 
more abundant life; and he knows far better than 
a layman the limits of his power — the diseases 
which he cannot cure, the disabilities which he 
cannot remove. 

Faith-healers must be wrong in pronouncing 
any means that produce health of body or mind 
to be evil. The principle is clearly laid down by 
Jesus that evil can never produce good; that 
wherever an evil thing is cast down, the human 
agent, whatever his doctrine, is the instrument of 
the finger of God. There is really no ambiguity 
in the well-known passage in which our Lord 
rebuts the charge of Satanic power, not by the 
slightest counter-charge, but by laying down the 
principle for all time that good is of God, and 
of God only. Then, too, even an imperfect 
acquaintance with the history of religious thought 
in its connection with the application of a dawning 



CHAP. V FAITH AND THE DOCTORS 231 

knowledge of nature to man's welfare ought to 
make it clear that no line can be drawn between 
the application of scientific truth to the preserva- 
tion of health (hygiene), and its application to the 
restoration of health (medicine and surgery). 
There is no boundary-line, the two merge; if 
one is pf God so is the other. As a good example 
of the alliance of science and faith in the promo- 
tion of health, we may remember that Christian 
saints at one time believed in the sanctity of dirt, 
that when one gleam of scientific light swept away 
from Christendom the idea that cleanliness was 
a sinful luxury, and when dirt also came to be 
regarded as a sign rather of impurity than of 
purity of soul, and the proverb "Cleanliness is 
next to godliness'' became a possibility, with dirt 
disappeared from Christian civilisation the more 
hideous forms of disease. The movement was 
scientific; the Church assimilated it to her great 
gain. 

We conclude that there can be no real opposi- 
tion between medical science and a salutary power 
over the body gained by faith in divine healing. 



CHAPTER VP . 

THE WILL OF GOD 

When Milton, in Samson Agonistes, makes his 
hero say, speaking of physical strength — 

God, when he gave me strength, to show withal 
How sHght the gift was, hung it in my hair — 

he incidentally expresses a time-worn belief of the 
Church that physical strength is unimportant. 
Without regarding this as a Christian idea, we 
agree that the whole value of physical health is 
in its use. In these days, when there is a cult of 
health and physical development, we are familiar 
with people who live to preserve their health or to 
restore it, fidgeting about the world for climates 
and diets and exercises — people whose lives grow 
more and more insignificant, until, should they 
attain to the utmost physical perfection, they would 
have reached only a condition which they would 
share with almost all animals. Animal health, 
which has no dignity as an end for human life, has 
dignity and worth as an instrument of the mind, 
and is its necessary instrument. 

^ The substance of this and the following chapter appeared 
as an article in the Hibbert Journal, April 1906. 

232 



CHAP. VI THE WILL OF GOD 233 

If Jesus was the Saviour of the world, he 
certainly began his salvation with the bodies of 
men. After having endured in his own person 
the pains of hardship and exhaustion, and the 
special pressure of temptation upon physical weak- 
ness, he began, as the Revised Version has it, 
publicly to cure "all manner of disease and all 
manner of sickness. And the report of him went 
forth into all Syria : and they brought unto him all 
that were sick, holden with divers diseases and 
torments, possessed with devils, and epileptic, and 
palsied, and he healed them." He gave physical 
health, and cast out all such evil forces as were not 
under the control of the human will. The first 
manifestation of his glory, according to St. John's 
Gospel, was at a marriage which he blessed by his 
presence, and by the gift of an abundant supply 
of the wine typical of that era of exalted physical 
life which it was, as it seemed, his mission to 
proclaim. 

The necessity which underlay the bestowal of 
this great gift of vitalising force for the body is 
explained in the Johannine Gospel when Jesus 
says that his works were one with the working of 
the Father through all time. "The intention of 
nature to heal," the preference of nature for health, 
of which science speaks, are but paraphrases for the 
law of God, the will of God, in the matter. 

Jesus seems to have taken all the popular 
beliefs of his era, as far as he thought they rep- 
resented truth, and striven to bless and brake 
them for the multitude. He took the common 
belief in marvellous cures, and transmuted it into 



234 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

a higher doctrine of the power of man and the 
invariable will of God. He taught that such cures 
were (i) the direct action of the finger of God; 
(2) the natural sequence to a definite attitude in 
the mind of man — not the mind of the healer, but 
of the suflFerer or those responsible for him. The 
condition on which man could receive in his body 
more of the overflowing vitality of God he freely 
preached, which was simply the faith appertaining 
to the cure. 

Supposing the sort of cures Jesus worked to 
have been, as has been so clamorously asserted, 
actions on nature from beyond the region of nature, 
nothing would be more remarkable than that the 
condition he required should have been this, and 
this only. He did not demand any moral standard, 
or the forming of any moral purpose; he did not 
ask for any loyalty to his kingdom. The body 
was made whole in every case of manifest desire or 
need, whether or not the desire extended to and 
procured spiritual blessing, and without any 
moralising on the uses of this form of adversity. 
In several cases warnings were added which showed 
all too clearly how little was to be expected for the 
future of those who had been cured. Thus it 
can hardly be supposed by the most didactically- 
minded reader that any work of "spiritual" grace 
was wrought on the lepers who never even gave 
thanks. Where Jesus failed to evoke the psychic 
condition required, as at Nazareth, he was the first 
to proclaim that the law under which he worked 
was unalterable. But the faith which conditioned 
the action of God in merely curing the body seems 



CHAP. VI THE WILL OF GOD 235 

to have been so elementary that even in faithless 
Nazareth he could cure a few sick folk. 

The action of Jesus in devoting so large a part 
of his short ministry to the healing of the body, 
and his readiness to heal apartfrom any qualification 
except the desire or need of the sufferer, contra- 
dict two conventional Christian ideas, — that bodily 
welfare is unimportant, and that bodily healing 
was regarded by Jesus as merely the prelude to 
moral reformation. 

But, it will be said, surely pain is necessary and 
salutary because it is the consequence and punish- 
ment and cure of sin in the individual and in 
the race; Jesus cannot have dissociated pain 
and sin. 

To this it may be replied that it seems 
impossible to justify suffering as a cure for sin 
when experience shows it is quite as often a cause 
of sin. Further, we have to reckon with the 
striking fact that Jesus plainly discountenanced the 
doctrine that suffering was the consequence of sin 
in the sufferer; and, in harmony with this, we 
have the fact, noticed in a former chapter, that 
suffering entailed by sin does not come to the 
guilty only, or to them in proportion to their 
guilt. But our contention here is not that sin and 
suffering are by Jesus dissociated, or can be 
dissociated, but rather that they are so closely 
associated as to be reciprocal parts of one great 
fact, and both to be warred against as offensive to 
God and inimical to man. 

The salvation of the inner life, which we 
believe lasts beyond death, by union with the life 



236 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

of God, is to the religious mind so much more 
important than the salvation of the body that we 
cannot believe that Jesus, w^ho v^as, if nothing 
more, the world's supreme religious genius, would 
have given half his attention to the salvation of 
this earthly body unless he had believed it to be 
essential to the full salvation of the spirit. Every 
Christian believes in one sense that health of body 
is necessary to the perfection of spiritual life, 
because he cannot think of a future salvation 
without the idea of perfection in a body or the 
equivalent of a body. It must be evident to the 
open mind that there is very little in the teaching 
of Jesus that can even suggest that he encouraged 
men to hope for a future salvation except as 
they experience it in this world; and the best 
Christian thought of every age, more especially 
of our own day, is eager to believe that salvation 
of the spirit is offered to us in this life. But we 
are in the throes of a transitional period, and we 
have not yet widely realised that if some perfect 
vehicle is necessary in the future to perfection of 
the spirit, so a healthy body must be necessary 
now to the highest degree of spiritual health 
attainable in this life. We are endeavouring to per- 
petuatefalse ideals of spiritual health, — ideals con- 
sistent with bodily weakness and disease — because 
high spiritual attainments were certainly reached 
by the saints in a period when bodily strength was 
ignorantly supposed to be a hindrance to spiritual 
attainment. Our religious prejudices are still fed 
by the eminent devotion that we find in the 
memoirs of mediaeval ascetics, because we have 



CHAP. VI THE WILL OF GOD 237 

not realised that their spiritual life became lusty in 
spite of, not because of, their neglect of the body. 
A corporate prejudice is always the path of least 
resistance for the individual mind; and yet, at the 
door of our understanding the Christ would seem 
to wait, in simplicity offering a perfectly natural, 
because a perfectly divine, salvation. He has 
summoned many messengers who call to us with 
many voices to open and let this salvation in. 

In the first place we have the voice of 
philosophy, emphasising the essential oneness of 
body and mind. Take the words of our leading 
English psychologist: 

"To regard mind as the collateral product of 
its own external perceptions is simply to invert 
the facts. One might as well say that reflections 
produce their own mirror, or that houses evolve 
architects. We are led, in a word, to doubt that 
mind and matter can be dual realities, either 
phenomenal or ontal." And again, "Since all 
that we know and feel and do, all our facts and 
theories, all our emotions and ideals and ends, 
may be included in this one term — experience, it 
is by raising this question as to the nature of 
experience that, as I think, we shall see the 
untenability of dualism." ^ 

Next let us hear what medical science has to 
say: 

"My contention simply is that from the stand- 
point of general pathology all normal and morbid 
mental phenomena must be regarded merely as 

^ Prof. James Ward, Sc.D., Naturalism and Agnosticism, 
vol. ii. pp. 106, no. 



238 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

the expression of the functional reaction of the 
organ concerned." ^ 

Next we come to the opinion of a physiologist. 

"A reflex has already taken place when the 
motor reaction of a cell is brought under the 
influence of an irritant. . . . The gesture by 
which we mechanically respond to the bow of 
another person is a reflex, an almost unconscious 
reflex when we bow abstractedly, a more complex 
reflex when we rapidly take in by the mind's eye 
the motives that prompted this act of politeness. 
And always and everywhere, whether it is a case 
of the action of the most humble organ or of 
the most exalted workings of our mind, it is just 
the same mechanism. ... A compliment tickles 
our self-esteem and influences our determinations. 
A cutting word excites our wrath and makes our 
blood boil. The involuntary gesture is associated 
with our mental reactions. . . . Physiology must 
undertake the work of pursuing the study of these 
reactions of the organism, whether they have to 
do with nutrition and the ordinary reproduction 
of all living beings, or with the simple psychic 
facts that are observed in animals, or the marvellous 
mechanism of the human mind in its highest 
manifestations. . . . 

"The simple idea of absolute or relative human 
liberty leads us to establish an essential diff'erence 
between a fault of character and a mental malady. 
This distinction, and I cannot repeat it too often, 
is artificial and untenable. At what degree 

^ From paper read before the British Medical Association, 
1901, by W. Ford Robertson, M.D., pp. 67, 82-3. 



CHAP. VI THE WILL OF GOD 239 

do indecision, irritability, impressionability, and 
emotional disturbances become sicknesses ? Are 
sorrow and pessimism faults or illnesses ? In the 
mental domain it is still more impossible to try 
to make this distinction. It seems only to exist 
when one is looking at the extremes. It seems 
normal to us to be sad when we lose a friend, to 
be discouraged in the presence of failure; but we 
regard anybody as diseased who commits suicide 
in order to escape the perplexities to which we 
are all subjected. We all have our periods of 
indecision, which often appear exaggerated to the 
eyes of others; but we send a patient to a 
physician when he passes hours in agonising 
perplexity without being able to decide whether 
he will change his shirt to-day or to-morrow. . . . 
Properly speaking, then, psychology is only a 
chapter of physiology, of biology." ^ 

Or let us listen to the cry of the practical 
religious reformer. The Jesuit tells us that if he 
has the custody of a child for its first seven years, 
by God's help he will form its life; and he does 
it. Who can hold a child morally responsible 
for the environment of its earlier years ^ The 
revivalist cries, "Give me crowds, and music, and 
power of speech by which to excite their sensi- 
bilities, and God will snap the chains of habit 
and education that hold many individuals in the 
crowd, and start them on a new life from which 
they will not revert;" and it is done. Yet the 
hour and the music and the oratory are to men 
thus converted mere physical accidents. 

^ Dr. Paul Dubois, Psychic Treatment of Nervous Disorders* 



240 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

Mind, independent of brain, is an assumption 
made because, on the whole, the functions of body 
and brain account for the self less adequately than 
does the assumption of mind. Mind, thought of 
apart, is hypothetical just as God is hypothetical, 
and we may add, just as free will is hypothetical. 
All these conceptions are in the region of faith. 
We believe in the freedom of our wills, though 
determinism seems to be a fact of knowledge. 
We believe that mind can separate from body, 
but have no knowledge of the abstraction called 
"the soul." 

We may be bewildered by the different stand- 
points from which our modern schools are showing 
us this mystery, asserting the oneness of spirit 
and body in various connections, but we can no 
longer set aside their many voices. One section 
of them tells us that the criminal is a criminal 
because of the defective bodily tissue that he has 
inherited, and therefore it is cruelty to attribute to 
him any personal moral failure, or punish him 
as a delinquent. Another set are telling us that, 
because parents will certainly transmit their own 
sins in defective physique to their children, their 
moral responsibility is heightened by that know- 
ledge and extends, not only to the necessity of a 
higher moral life, but to the need for the most 
hygienic life, and that if they refuse to act up to 
this responsibility they should be judged and 
treated as criminals. Another set are telling us 
that, because our every fault is the result of some 
morbid functioning in the brain-cells, health 
rather than spiritual life is the counsel of per- 



CHAP. VI THE WILL OF GOD 241 

fection; while another and ever-growing school 
is declaring that most of our diseases proceed 
from the morbid action of the brain, which is 
caused by morbid thoughts under the control of 
the will, and that, by calling in the aid of religion 
or philosophy or morals, we can so exercise healthy 
thoughts as to cure our bodies and keep them in 
health. Who shall tell us the difference between 
the spiritual and physical life ? It would take too 
long to tell the innumerable aspects in which the 
unity of mind and matter is forcing itself upon us. 

The bearing of this unity upon the religious 
theory of life is very close. If physical evil 
produces moral evil we can no longer believe that 
a God to whom moral evil is abhorrent is the 
author of our physical afflictions. Either moral 
evil must be within the scheme of God's special 
providence for the soaring soul, or else physical 
evil cannot be part of his providence. If we 
ought, in the name of all that is holy, to resign 
ourselves to bodily disease as his will, we ought to 
resign ourselves to sinfulness for the same reasons. 
If, on the other hand, he calls us, in his name and 
by his strength, to resist sin because it is loathsome 
to him, we must, for the same reason, resist disease. 
If the salvation from sin is by faith and through 
the energy of his supernatural life, we must, to 
hold him consistent, believe that he offers the 
same energy of supernatural life to be utilised by 
our faith against what is only another aspect of 
sin. 

Nor can we, with any consistency, distinguish 
between sin and the bodily results of sin by the 



242 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

argument that it is his will that we suffer the 
results because the race has sinned. Take, for 
example, the case of a good man in the prime of 
life, living well by all the laws of hygiene, morals, 
and religion, who finds himself suddenly attacked 
by some hideous organic disease that cannot be 
attributed to his mode of life. The religious 
theory is that God sends the disease in order to 
do a work of grace in his soul which could not 
otherwise be done. If the man be in a gracious 
condition there is no doubt that he will be very 
conscious of unique nearness to God in the 
extremity of his need. Real, vital, as this ex- 
perience in itself is, it proves nothing beyond 
itself. These hours of unique consciousness of 
God's presence — what are they ^ Is a good man 
really nearer to God at one time than at another ? 
His consciousness of God's presence is due to 
the intense attention that he devotes to knocking 
at the door of God's own place, to seeking his 
face, to asking for his grace. Was he incapable 
in health of devoting this attention .? Is it 
necessary to believe that God requires the whirl- 
wind of emotion and the fire of pain in which to 
speak, and that in the quiet monotony of health 
and the normal exercise of benevolent activities 
for the spread of the kingdom he cannot make 
his still small voice heard ^ In the meantime 
the sick man's benevolent activities for the world 
are stopped; the benevolent activities of his 
household are withdrawn from the world and 
centred upon him; the physical health of every 
one closely connected with him is lowered by 



CHAP. VI THE WILL OF GOD 243 

contact with pain and disease; the subjects of 
this contact are by such lowering made more 
Hable to such disease, even if no contagious 
germs escape. Is the world so thoroughly saved 
that it can be through any will of God or his 
Christ that good men and women who are spend- 
ing their lives for its salvation must concentrate 
all their energies in enduring or curing or solacing 
disease, in order that some vital hours of personal 
communion with God may be attained ^ Nor, 
because such is the present order of things, ought 
that mere fact to induce the Christian mind to 
believe that the order is of God. "Whatever is, 
is right" must apply to all vice if it is accepted 
as a principle. 

How often are we confronted with the saying 
that it is the good and the lovely who die young, 
the useful and the loving who are cut off in their 
prime, while the useless and crabbed, the worse 
than useless and worse than sour, live on. This 
impression is, no doubt, a case of the fallacy of 
positive instances; but it is only an over-state- 
ment of the certain fact that death and misfortune 
assail and disable those who are helping in every 
good cause as often as those who are hindering 
the progress of the race. How does this bear on 
our faith in a God who wills and works for our 
moral progress .? The record of every Christian 
mission shows how large a proportion of the 
workers, perhaps after long preparation, fall 
prematurely on the field, or are rendered useless 
by accidents or diseases which might occur any- 
where or to men engaged in any enterprise — 



244 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

misfortunes not necessarily involved in that 
personal conflict with evil which constitutes some 
degree of martyrdom, and which may be, even in 
failure, a moral triumph. All political and com- 
mercial records show how many are the forms of 
disaster that dog the steps of every noble enterprise, 
as well as the particular form of failure which its 
nobility challenges. When we reflect on the 
attribution of all this to the divine attention we 
cannot but be vividly reminded of our Lord's 
words, "Every kingdom divided against itself is 
brought to desolation." 



CHAPTER VII 

HISTORY OF HEALTH BY FAITH 

We have every evidence that the apostles believed 
without question that all the children of the king- 
dom, to whom they in their turn ministered, had 
a right to this least part of the great salvation, the 
initial blessing of bodily health ; and the last verses 
of St. Mark's Gospel, with all other later additions 
to the Gospels on the same topic, prove clearly the 
general faith of the early Church,^ viz. that every 
believer was to have health in a degree that would 
render him immune from all poisons, and give him 
the power of presence which can evoke self-govern- 
ment in those who have lost mental or bodily 
control of themselves. 

* The fathers and historians of the first five centuries clearly 
testify to the power of the Church to heal by faith. From among 
them take only two in addition to Tertullian, already quoted. 

Irenaeus, second century, as quoted by Eusebius: "Far are 
they, the Churches, from raising the dead in the manner the Lord 
and his apostles did, by prayer, yet even among the brethren 
frequently, in a case of necessity, when a whole church has 
united in much fasting and prayer, the spirit has returned to 
the exanimated body, and the man has been granted to the 
prayers of the saints." And again : "Some most certainly and 
truly cast out demons ... as others heal the sick by the im- 
position of hands, and moreover, as we said above, even the dead 

245 



246 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

Yet we quickly discover that in many com- 
munities the blessing was not realised; as, for 
instance, in the Church of Corinth, where, not a 
lifetime after the institution of the Lord's Supper, 
many were weak and sickly and many died 
prematurely. St. Paul reproaches the Corinthians 
with this, and points out the cause (i Cor. xi. 
29-30). If the touch of Christ's body in the 
sacrament had always been accepted by faith to 
the maintenance of the health that the body 
needed to enable it to glorify him, the holiest as 
well as the basest must have used the temple of 
God more reverently, and could not have supposed 
austerities to be for the welfare of the soul. 

For centuries before the Christian era the doc- 
trine that sin emanated from what was material 
had been implied in the philosophies of India and 
Greece, and had pressed into the Semitic religions 
from both sides. It had had a large effect upon 
the most progressive Judaic thinkers, and early 
tainted the teaching of the Christian Church, which 
it afterward permeated. As Dr. Bruce remarks, 
Jesus did not teach this. "He is reported to have 

have been raised and continued with us many years. ... As 
the church has freely received she also freely ministers." 

Eusebius, early in fourth century: "Who is he who knows 
not how delightful it is to us that through the name of our 
Saviour, coupled with prayers that are pure, we cast out every 
kind of demon f And thus the word of our Saviour, and the 
doctrine which is from him, have made us all to be greatly su- 
perior to the power which is invisible," etc. And he adds the 
reason why these gifts had declined in the Church in his time — 
namely, not that the heritage of miracle had ceased, but that 
the Churches were "unworthy" of them. 



CHAP. VII HEALTH BY FAITH 247 

said to the priests and elders: 'The publicans and 
the harlots shall go into the kingdom of God before 
you/ The grounds of this comparative estimate 
are obvious. The sins of the one class had their 
seat and source in the flesh, leaving the inner man 
to a certain extent untouched; the sins of the 
Pharisees v^ere vices of the spirit, sin had possessed 
the v^hole spiritual nature. ... In the light of 
this judgment of Christ, and its grounds, we see 
hov^ far he was from entertaining the view as to 
the nature and origin of sin held by the Greeks 
and by deists, that it has its seat in the flesh, and 
makes its appearance in human conduct because 
man is a being possessed of a material organisation 
which exercises a misleading, disturbing influence 
upon his rational nature. He rather believed that 
sin appears only in mitigated form when it springs 
out of bodily appetites and passions, and that it is 
seen in its true malignity when it has its origin in 
the soul, and reveals an evil will, a selfish heart, 
and a perverted conscience." ^ 

Had the Church maintained the view that 
health was the heritage of the children of the 
Lord, Christendom, as far as we can see, would 
have been saved from the distress caused by the 
supposed antagonism between the laws of nature 
and the laws of grace. Had the children of the 
light of faith accepted the teaching of Jesus that 
all good is of God, the light which is their special 
inheritance would have made them love all light. 
They would not have stoned the prophets of 
scientific light that God raised up time and again, 

^ Apologetics, by A. B. Bruce, D.D., pp. 57-58. 



248 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

even in dark ages; and the world would not have 
waited for modern science before it learnt that 
there is a distinct "intention'' in nature towards 
health — in other words, that the divine sustaining 
force intends health. The source of the Church's 
error and lack has always been unbelief; and 
having, through unbelief, mislaid the gift of 
health, she next pointed to her own experience to 
prove that God had withdrawn it. But "kings 
give, they do not lend"; and the gift, once given, 
must be hers. Confidently holding to the full 
salvation of her Saviour, she could never have 
assimilated the belief that physical nature was in 
some peculiar way the home of the devil, and half 
her warfare would have been accomplished ere it 
was begun. Her force would have been more 
steadfastly directed against the real strongholds of 
the enemy, which to-day still stand strong. 

Disregard of bodily pain had no part in the 
mind of Christ; but indifference to pain, even the 
seeking of pain to develop fortitude, were aspects 
of a virtue much esteemed by the heathen world. 
It was, indeed, the tenderness of Jesus Christ 
which, as much if not more than anything else, 
made it difficult for the heathen world to accept 
him as a hero; and it is the legacy of these 
heathen sentiments that makes his precepts seem 
impracticable to us to-day. Had Jesus pandered 
in the least degree to that insensibility to suffering 
which every savage and all ascetics seek after, and 
to the belief in force, the earthly synonym for 
governm.ent, he would to that degree have wor- 
shipped the prince of this world and attained 
worldly dominion more easily. 



CHAP. VII HEALTH BY FAITH 249 

Where he performed God's will perfectly the 
Church failed, and soon depicted her Saviour as a 
God so austere that a feminine object of adoration 
was felt to be necessary. With a great and ever- 
increasing number of heathen converts, indifference 
to pain came early to be regarded as a Christian 
virtue, and the infliction of pain a Christian 
necessity : asceticism and persecution stalk hand 
in hand across the fields of Christendom. The 
same law of the power of mind over body which 
at the beneficent command of Christ worked 
health, began under different direction to produce 
marvels of a different sort: the choice of horrid 
austerities, visions, levitations, such phenomena as 
that of the stigmata — all these became manifesta- 
tions of the spiritual life which we do not now con- 
sider wholesome. As they were supposed to be the 
will of God quite as much as were marvels of heal- 
ing, which still incidentally accompanied them, it 
became necessary to suppose that God, who 
worked these miracles, aimed, not at health or at 
ill-health, but at marvels. Thus, when unhealthy 
results of religious fervour came to be classed with 
the normal benefits of faith, both kinds of evidence 
of what was called supernatural power were con- 
stantly simulated, fell into disrepute with the 
thoughtful, and, except as temporary and localised 
manifestations, gradually ceased. Although, in 
dusty archives, the Church has preserved theoretic 
belief in her power to heal the sick, she never 
practically admits that it is her duty to heal them. 

In this general gloom God's Spirit of truth 
and blessing, always pressing to enter the heart 



250 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

of humanity, is seen in those movements which 
rose to assert the claim of nature to be instinct 
with God and the claim of man's body to 
reverence. Prophets of physical science appeared 
who discerned unity under variety, order under 
confusion, truth under all that was phenomenal 
— conceptions ever denoting a supreme object 
of faith. The Church refused to identify her 
God with that underlying reason and power 
which the inspired prophets of science, dimly 
at first, discerned, and served with the faith 
of martyrs. The reason of her refusal was 
fear; the reason of her fear was lack of faith. 
She was holding on to the Source of Faith with 
only one hand; the other hung withered at her 
side. In practice she had pushed aside the actual, 
exquisite, marvellous temple of the Holy Ghost, 
the individual body of flesh; she must, pursuing 
this path, set aside the individual brain and mind, 
the light of reason. Having lost reverence for 
the individual body, her conception of the corpor- 
ate body became artificial, including and excluding 
too much; and, despising the individual mind, her 
method of ascertaining the corporate mind became 
ineff^ectual. The faith of individualism and the 
faith of science joined forces throughout Christen- 
dom, and fought against the cult of the withered 
hand and all that want of faith which makes for 
bondage and a partial salvation. 

While the anguish of this war was and is, we 
always find in secluded spots the recognition of 
the revelation that would have hindered this 
unnatural strife. A series of local communities 



CHAP. VII HEALTH BY FAITH 251 

arose which determinedly held the belief that the 
health of the body was the will of Christ, and to 
be claimed by prayer. Examining what records 
there are of these in the light of those more 
modern sects which exhibit faith-cures for our 
inspection to-day, there cannot be, for the un- 
prejudiced Christian, much doubt that wherever 
this part of Christian faith has been exercised, 
many mighty works of healing have taken place. 
Let us, then, note carefully that when a number 
of people who believed that health could be claimed 
as the will of God gathered together, shut up to 
their own society either by some separating 
doctrine or by persecution, faith rose to an un- 
wavering height, and was crowned by the divine 
response. A shrine or relic that evoked the 
necessary faith has always produced the same 
results. As an example, take the miracles of 
healing at the tomb of the Jansenist Abbe Paris 
in the eighteenth century, said by Hume to have 
been as well attested as the best evidence in a 
learned age could make them. There is evidence 
that the same thing happened among the early 
Moravians and Quakers; and, here and there, 
within or without sectarian communities, healers 
arose who had the power of so convincing and 
leading other men's minds and emotions that in 
many cases they could produce in others the 
certainty which they themselves possessed. Luther 
himself, though like all the reformers prejudiced 
against Popish "miracles," did by prayer cast out 
demons and recover men from the point of death. 
If any one will examine critically, yet reverently, the 



252 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

life of the faith-healing communities of to-day, he 
will find that the same circumstances are necessary 
to bring about any fair proportion of such cures as 
are variously called instances of "the divine heal- 
ing," or "the faith-cure," or "the mind-cure." 
Either the subject must enter into the community 
and, by accepting its separating doctrines, close 
eyes and ears to the larger Church without, or 
he must be under the constant and prolonged 
influence of some individual who holds the con- 
viction with enthusiasm, or he must visit some 
shrine, or be in a solitary place, as some missionaries 
and travellers are, or be isolated by disposition, 
circumstance, or infirmity. Yet, although there 
are many successes, now, as formerly, the result of 
what seems to be absolute faith is not always 
health; and more baffling still to the honest 
inquirer is the fact that it is not the highest type 
of mind or character that most frequently receives 
sudden or obvious accession of health. 

From such a record very varying inferences 
are drawn, even by those who realise keenly that 
the Church has lost and is losing much by resisting 
this part of the gospel of Christ. In attempting 
an explanation, some have even endeavoured to 
classify diseases as curable or non-curable by the 
Almighty ! Others have thought to make the 
acquisition of health, even in the present state of 
the Church, the test of spiritual obedience, and in 
other ways to make the available evidence prove 
more or less than it does. 

Let us be careful neither to add to nor subtract 
from such records as we have. If we would draw 



CHAP. VII HEALTH BY FAITH 253 

a right inference we must first go back to where 
the true faith sprang, where the Divine Man 
grasped God with both hands, bringing together 
into a unity within human ken the force which 
animates and sustains matter and the voice which 
speaks to the conscience of man. 

We find that Jesus does not blame the 
individual for lack of faith, while he constantly 
reproves, upbraids, and reproaches his race, his 
generation, and the religious classes in the nation, 
for faithlessness. Only after his apostles had 
lived exclusively in his companionship for some 
time does he level the reproach at the little band; 
and there is but one solitary instance in which, 
before his death, he reproves an individual for the 
sin of doubt. When our Lord upbraids the Jews 
for lack of faith, he does it on the ground that 
the national movements of the time, especially the 
preaching of John, ought to have raised the 
general level of faith. The paradox of individual 
and corporate faith — it is only by the utmost effort 
of individuals that the many can rise; it is only 
by the rise of the many that any individual can 
realise the fruit of his effort — is always just below 
the surface of his discourse. Even while Jesus 
upbraids his fellow-countrymen for unbelief, he 
freely admits that their ears and eyes are closed 
and their hearts hardened by the spirit of their 
generation; he ceaselessly and hopefully exhorts 
the individual to faith or praises him for possessing 
it, he never blames him for want of faith ; he con- 
stantly blames the collective soul for doubting, 
but admits that his exhortation will be useless. 



254 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

Here we come on the reality of the corporate 
nature of reHgion, and knock against the hmit of 
individual responsibility and power. In religion, 
the region in which the soul gains most in solitude 
with God, it is seen to be most dependent on 
the corporate soul. The individual or strongest 
religious purpose cannot rise far above the average 
level, and can outstrip by very little the nobler 
characters of his time. This is not a matter for 
argument, but a fact of history. All history 
shows that the inspiration of the giants of faith is 
conditioned by the mind of their age. That all 
this, which our Lord recognised, is the current 
thought of to-day is shown by the frequent use of 
such phrases as "the spirit of the age," "telepathy," 
"the war fever," "esprit de corps." 

It has before been remarked that the idea of 
wonderful cures worked by those specially religious 
was the common belief in Palestine and the sur- 
rounding countries at the time of Christ. It was, 
therefore, not more difficult then for the individual 
to rise to the assured expectation of bodily health 
which the person and teaching of Jesus evoked 
than it is now for men to be patriotic when a 
popular war makes patriotism rife, or to show 
self-abnegation at a time when great calamity 
is drawing out the more unselfish virtues of the 
community. The case became different where a 
Christian man or Christian community was sur- 
rounded by a more sceptical heathen element, as, 
for example, in the case of St. Paul himself, who 
was often obliged to conduct his solitary warfare 
surrounded by unbelievers, or in the case of the 



CHAP. VII HEALTH BY FAITH 255 

Church at Corinth, where " many were sick " ; or 
later, in the case of all believers, when the Church 
as a whole had practically repudiated any duty 
with regard to the health of the body. 

These considerations make it evident why 
modern sects that preach the healing of the body 
by faith find by experiment that the diseased 
person must be surrounded by the faithful in a 
community, or worked upon by a healer, or, in 
one way or another, isolated from the common 
unbelief of the mass. They also explain why 
higher natures that have the widest intellectual 
sympathy are seldom at present the subjects of 
notable " cures " — such will always, by their power 
of sympathy, be most subject to the woe of the 
common mind. To-day, every individual who 
reasonably accepts the salvation of the body is 
dragged back by the collective soul of Christen- 
dom ; and men of the five talents, large in under- 
standing and heart, are least able to brush aside 
the race of which they are part. They do not 
build towers upon which a few can appear to be 
nearer heaven; rather they put down new pave- 
ments in the city of God among men, thus raising 
the whole slowly. Their faith, many times more 
fervent than that of the bigot, produces a less 
visible but much greater result. When the 
corporate faith reaches a higher level, the gain 
of the whole will show in them most richly, and 
in them will find its culmination. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE BALANCE OF NATURE 

The ethical laws of the kingdom demand that a 
moral miracle be worked within us. The physical 
powers displayed by Jesus as characteristic features 
of that kingdom are also beyond our natural reach, 
although perhaps not so far beyond as its moral 
requirements. We cannot doubt that Jesus meant 
these two sorts of heavenly power — the power of 
obedience to the law of love, and the power of 
working the physical marvels of faith — to be 
associated as a double revelation of God's will for 
men, and to be brought into clear contrast with 
human powerlessness. All that he preached 
revealed man's moral imperfection in the strong 
sunlight of God, as in spring sunshine an old coat 
shows stains and rents and threadbare patches 
that we had not suspected in the gloom of winter; 
all that he did brought out man's powerlessness 
to cope with the physical nature to which he was 
bound. 

The vision of physical power in the healing of 
body and mind and in control over the things of 
earth, was needed to enable the first disciples to 

256 



CH. VIII THE BALANCE OF NATURE 257 

trust to that invisible moral force which could so 
change man's moral nature that the impossible 
good should become possible. The good news 
which Jesus set forth was that God was willing 
and able to work with man and in man to pro- 
duce, not only pure unhampered moral activity, 
but also superior physical power to be its support 
and maintain the true balance of human nature. 
If physical power does not grow with the growth of 
the spiritual nature, ill must result, and as a plain 
matter of fact it does result. There is a truth 
embedded in the contention of the materialistic 
medical school that religion is detrimental to 
health. It is not only in religious manias of 
various sorts that it is illustrated. Is it not true 
that the sanest family, if possessed by the true 
religious enthusiasm, does not maintain itself in 
physical vigour or increase in successive genera- 
tions, but rather dwindles in numbers and in force ? 
We see this phenomenon around us, and when we 
hear the more spiritually-minded medical school 
recommend religion as an aid to a healthy life 
we are not surprised that they limit their recom- 
mendation to religion of a moderate sort and 
degree. They warn us against any religious 
originality or depth of feeling or mystic vision. 
We are bound to admit that the facts of our 
present physical life bear out the warning. 

Yet Professor Seeley's dictum, "No heart is 
pure that is not passionate; no virtue is safe that 
is not enthusiastic," ^ stands as a most noble 
expression of the truth that to practise a nice 

^ Ecce Homo, chap. i. 



258 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

moderation in religion is to be something much 
lower than irreligious. The excitement of the 
religious crowd gives insight into the things of 
God, gives the faith that accepts God's gift of 
moral and physical health; ecstasy and agony in 
private prayer have their uses in the most practical 
life of religious benevolence; from their secret 
is learnt the art of blessing the world openly. 
What we need is, not to guard against religious 
intensity, but to seek bodily reinforcement. If it 
were true that either hunger and thirst for God or 
bodily health and social well-being must be sacri- 
ficed, we would defy the doctors and cast away 
physical welfare without a sigh. If such is the 
choice the ascetic is right. But such was not the 
choice that Jesus offered. He came to unite the 
forces which had been set at variance, to restore 
the balance of human nature. It is this better 
balance of which we now feel the need so sorely. 
We want health and strength, more practical 
friendliness with the laws of nature, and more 
strenuous use of them for the welfare of the world. 
With the energies of physical regeneration work- 
ing in him and through him, man may exercise to 
the full all his forces of prayer, in the strengthening 
of which lies the only hope of individual and racial 
salvation. 

A Church which for insanity and hysteria, 
disease and infirmity, can offer none but rare and 
occasional remedy, which goes further and teaches 
that these are God's will for the world, is unfit 
to represent the Apostles or early Fathers, and 
certainly does not represent the Christ. It cannot 



CH. VIII THE BALANCE OF NATURE 259 

be honest, it cannot be pleasing to God, to laud 
Jesus Christ as divine and at the same time teach 
that God's will is to be descried and accepted in 
those things which Jesus taught were the work of 
the Evil One and to be abolished by Christian 
faith. It matters nothing here whether in speak- 
ing of the kingdom of Satan his words were 
parabolic or had the meaning they bear on their 
face; he certainly meant that all the ills that flesh 
is heir to were against the will of God. 

Let the Church seek for truth in the right way 
and she will find the meaning of this parable, if 
parable it is. When she accepts the authority of 
Jesus and does his work, she will by degrees 
know all the truth she needs regarding this terrible 
fact of disease : she will never know it before. 
Jesus pointed to the prayer of faith. How many 
hours, by what multitudes of people, are spent 
each week in Christendom, wailing out complaints 
to God and repeating cries for his mercy in 
temporal things, as if his lack of mercy was the 
cause of all our privations ! How arrogant is the 
assumption, how unfaithful, how sad ! When the 
Church puts a stop to this insult to the divine 
nature, and spends the same time in expressing 
her humble, joyful trust that the power of Jesus 
will be made operative in his kingdom, then, and 
not till then, will she have taken his way. 

The imitation of Jesus includes the healing of 
the sick, the casting out of devils, the feeding of 
the poor with enough and to spare, the turning 
of the common water of the common life into 
the wine of love. This imitation is obligatory, 



26o GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

and requires from first to last something much 
more than imitation. It requires a will divine in 
its strength — as much stronger than that which 
we have by nature as the will of Jesus was stronger 
than ours, God's will within a human will, strong 
enough to embrace the pain of the world and 
vanquish death and all its powers, a resignation of 
human fear and timidity to God's will which 
works life, and more abundant life, for all. It is 
not by reciting the creeds of the past and girding 
at those who reject them, and certainly not by 
rejecting them as the result of some transient 
position of the schools, that the Church can ever 
teach the world to believe. She must so rejoice 
in God her Saviour as to communicate his health, 
physical and moral, to the sick and sinful, until 
they shall be compelled by experience to rise up 
and call her blessed. 

The result of much eclectic Christianity, which, 
although it fights for the doctrine of the Incarna- 
tion, chooses out of the revelation of Christ those 
points of teaching and practice by which it will 
abide, has been a fashion of taking from the story 
all that is not consistent with a modern materialism. 
This has formed a religion perfectly comprehen- 
sible, but on all sides we see the children of those 
who hold it seeking food for faith in the large 
assumptions of a dogmatic pessimism or in the 
more cheerful folly of preaching that there is 
nothing real in sin or sorrow. Results so un- 
expected ought surely to make it clear that we 
are quite incapable of knowing what effect any 
doctrine will have upon the nature within us that 



CH. VIII THE BALANCE OF NATURE 261 

we so little understand, ought surely to make us 
humble enough to accept the revelation of the 
Incarnation in its entirety, if we accept it at all. 

If health of body and volitional power is the 
heritage of Christendom, it is waiting to be realised 
by a corporate faith. If there is a Divine abhor- 
rence of disease and all forms of nervous tyrannies 
and mental aberrations, all such suffering is due, 
not to necessity, but to the lack of faith in the 
Church at large. Many of the noblest children 
of the kingdom are to-day reasonably convinced 
that the procession of the Spirit of God manwards 
involves health of body and power of will, and 
yet cannot appropriate the health because of the 
faithlessness of the many. Here, then, is now 
the first necessity of the higher life, the individual 
and corporate faith which brings the significant 
and sacred experience of increased bodily power, 
a power that will make all spiritual verities more 
real. 

The only basis for such a faith is the acknow- 
ledged will of God. We cannot hold it and 
question whether it is God's will to cure one man 
or another. No shadow cast upon the world 
would be so terrible as that which would be cast 
by variableness or turning about of the will which 
is the source of all good and perfect gifts. There 
have been times and places in which it was thought 
to be a matter for the special providence of God 
whether this or that man m.ight be godly or not, 
ought to be clean or not: we now believe boldly 
that God's will is goodness, is cleanliness, for all. 
Faith in divine healing as revealed in the Lord 



262 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

Jesus cannot for any length of time rest on any- 
narrower foundation than this. Until we class 
together those awful realities, sin, disease, and 
dirt, and realise that ill-health of any sort bears 
to a man's body the same relation that dirt bears 
to his house or sin to his soul, faith in the healing 
touch of Christ will still tend to be associated with 
inadequate theologies, to be local and ephemeral, 
evinced by one section of Christians or another, 
but rejected by the Church at large. 



CHAPTER IX 



THE NATURE MARVELS 



While belief in the marvellous cures which Jesus 
worked upon the bodies and minds of men has 
become comparatively easy since we have gained 
evidence that such cures, although still com- 
paratively rare, are not out of the course of nature, 
those of his works classed as "nature-miracles" 
are still quite inexplicable to us. 

When the learning of men is applied to 
documents written by men and facts of human 
history, there comes a point in historic and literary 
criticism when all that need be known in order 
to form a sound judgment is known. That the 
Book of Daniel is not history ; that the writers of 
the New Testament made mistakes in their inter- 
pretation of the Old Testament, are statements 
which can be proved by ample evidence. On the 
other hand, in considering those Christian marvels 
which appear to contradict the laws of nature we 
must not seek an assurance inconsistent with the 
fact that nature is so imperfectly known to us that 
we can never be sure she has not some fresh 
surprise in store. 

263 



264 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

Some of the most impossible of them form 
part of the history of Jesus after the most searching 
literary tests have been applied to the record. 
They stand as an abiding witness that we are only 
beginning to understand what he gave us to learn, 
that the full meaning of his earthly ministry, as it 
relates to the duties and privileges of the kingdom 
on earth, is for future generations — just as the 
chiefest gains of science, the higher social life, and 
the fruition of all our progress, is for future 
generations. Yet there is something to be learnt 
from them now. 

Having seen that two out of the three classes 
of our Lord's marvels may well be conceived as 
within the province of nature, we have a strong 
presumption, in turning to the nature-miracles, 
that we shall find the same true of them. 

In the first place, it is certain that the Gospels 
lay no claim to record any miracle in the modern 
sense — by which term we mean, any action of God 
which, even if the same earthly conditions were 
present, need not occur again. At the beginning 
of the Christian era men had not tried to draw a 
dividing line between the possible and impossible 
in nature. Cataclysm.s w^hich belong strictly to 
the domain of nature, such as thunderbolts, earth- 
quakes, and other prodigies, were called marvels, 
in common with minor things which appeared to 
contradict natural order. The wonderful works 
which Jesus did were never catalogued as super- 
natural by the mind of the time, because nature 
herself was looked upon as the mother of marvels. 
God and nature had never been dissociated : what 



CHAP. IX THE NATURE MARVELS 265 

God did nature did; what nature did God did; 
or if the devil was supposed to be the agent, there 
was no dissociation of his works from those of 
nature, however extraordinary his actions might be. 
When science had her first beginnings she was 
bound to attempt to draw a hne between the 
possible and impossible; but in so doing she 
scarcely took time to classify the Gospel marvels, 
until a frightened and self-defensive Church took 
upon her unbidden a quarrel with the knowledge 
of nature that comes through science, and insisted 
on claiming them as miracles in the scientific 
sense. 

Secondly, if the signs we are discussing were 
* miraculous,' we are bound to admit that they fall 
far short of what men might naturally expect, and 
had been taught to expect, of the unconditioned 
action of divine power. They did not realise the 
conception which man in the ancient world had, 
which man still popularly has, of power and glory. 
The psalms, the prophetic writings of Israel, are 
full of descriptions of more glorious acts of God's 
power; and in the poetry of polytheistic religions 
works of greater splendour are attributed to their 
deities when they would manifest their presence 
to men. The pillar of fire and cloud which 
went before Israel in the wilderness; the thunders 
of Jove; the flaming arrows of Apollo, and 
the earthquakes of Poseidon, "shaker of the sea 
and land" — all these suggest divine power by 
their magnificence. Jewish expectation in the 
time of Christ was moulded by such passages in 
prophetic poetry as these: — "The child shall die 



266 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

an hundred years old." "The wolf and the lamb 
shall feed together; the lion shall eat straw like 
the bullock. They shall not hurt nor destroy." 
"The Lord will come with fire and with his 
chariots, like a whirlwind." "Then shall thy 
light break forth as the morning, and thine health 
shall spring forth speedily, and thy righteousness 
shall go before thee, and the glory of the Lord shall 
be thy rearward." Or they had God's power 
suggested by figures drawn from earthly power 
and victory, such as, "I will gather all nations 
against Jerusalem to battle . . . Then shall the 
Lord go forth and fight against those nations." 
Or they had the mysteries of the unseen requisi- 
tioned in all those abnormal psychic phenomena 
described by the prophet Joel and joyfully claimed 
by St. Peter as fulfilled in the days of Pentecost. 

We are familiar with the idea that the Jews 
expected the Messiah to be an earthly king with 
a temporal kingdom and were disappointed; but 
we do not sufficiently dwell on the fact that, 
whatever may have been the expectations of glory 
raised by the figures in which the prophets foretold 
outward manifestations of God's spiritual power, 
they were no more realised in the marvels of 
Jesus than was the expectation of temporal power 
realised in .the kingdom he established. We all 
admit that there was an obvious reason why Jesus 
did not establish an empire of this world : if our 
Lord had had all the kingdoms of the world given 
to him by some power external to those kingdoms, 
either God or devil, he would, without the long 
process of natural conversion, have had no hold 



CHAP. IX THE NATURE MARVELS 267 

upon them, unless that precious requisite of salva- 
tion, their power of choice, had been taken from 
them. Further, we admit that to perform miracles 
which coerced man's reason would have been to 
use a force as futile as that of armies which could 
but coerce his outward acts of worship. But 
although the best Christian thought disclaims the 
idea that the Gospel miracles were designed to 
coerce man's reason, we have to face the fact that 
almost all notable Christian apologists have claimed 
that they are miracles in the sense of being effects 
for which no cause can be assigned except the 
unconditioned fiat of the Almighty; and it is 
further claimed that miracles in this sense are the 
only proper attendants of the stupendous fact of 
the Incarnation — necessary signs of divine glory 
and power when God descended to dwell among 
men. The nature-miracles are the last stronghold 
of those who maintain this view, which must now 
be briefly considered. Against it an important 
difficulty is to be urged. 

If, as our apologists have claimed, the miracles 
wrought by Jesus were not conditioned by means, 
why did they fall so far short of what they might 
have been when all that was required by the 
psychic law, "My kingdom is not of this world," 
was that they should not coerce man's reason .? 
We seem compelled to ask why, if ten lepers 
could be healed at a word, all the lepers in 
Palestine were not quietly healed. If three 
disciples might see the transfigured Christ, why 
might not that vision have been vouchsafed to the 
imprisoned Baptist, or the perplexed mother, or 



268 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

the doubting Thomas ? If wine could be made 
to flow freely at one wedding-feast, why not at 
a multitude of feasts ? If a weary crowd could 
be fed upon a mountain side, why not the poor of 
the cities, left during those three years in their 
habitual condition of disease and semi-starvation ? 
Such benevolences as these might have persuaded 
without compulsion. 

There are only two possible answers to the 
question, why the marvellous works of Jesus fell 
so far short of what every one must expect of the 
Manifestation of divine power. One — that there 
was indeed here nothing but a holy man about 
whose history grew a miraculous legend — is quite 
inadequate; for had these marvels been legendary, 
they would have been many times more glorious, 
as well as more fantastic and paltry. The second 
answer appears to be the only one that satisfies 
reason; it is that they were as strictly conditioned 
by the natural sequences of cause and effect as any 
action of our own, the difference being that they 
were conditioned by sequences of which we have 
only the slightest knowledge. If the marvels 
wrought by Jesus were strictly the result of natural 
causes, psychical or physical, if he could only do 
what he did by taking the utmost advantage of 
the psychic and physical means that the strength 
of his personality put within his control, we can 
well understand why those works were so limited 
in scope. Thus, in the strict limitation of the 
range and outward glory of the wonders worked 
by Jesus we have another strong presumption that 
they were subject to conditions. 



CHAP. IX THE NATURE MARVELS 269 

Have we, then, in the works of Jesus nothing 
unique, nothing that adequately testifies to a Pres- 
ence on earth that compels the adoration of the 
pure in heart, while it defies estimation by any 
of the human standards by which men had before 
him been obliged to measure the divine ? 

We compare our Lord's miracles with the 
natural expectation concerning phenomena that 
would show forth divine glory, and they appear 
poor and meagre. We compare them, again, with 
the marvels that have their birth in local fancies 
and their record in religious fiction, and we find 
in them a dignity that in this comparison is 
majestic, a tender utility and grave economy 
which mark them as belonging to a higher and 
purer level of thought. When we make a third 
comparison, and set our Lord's power as displayed 
in the nature-miracles beside human power with 
which we are familiar, we are confounded by the 
contrast of man's feebleness in the midst of natural 
forces. 

Compare the genius of the man Napoleon. 
Perhaps no other man has shown such extraordi- 
nary power in organising rough crowds into armies, 
in compelling the wealth and the ingenuity of the 
world for the sustenance and equipment of those 
armies. What was it that foiled him in the zenith 
of his power ? A desert place and a hungry 
multitude ! In our late war in South Africa the 
same direful circumstances were repeated many 
a time on a smaller scale; they come home to us 
because the sufferers were those of our own house- 
hold. Once, upon the veldt, a little company, 



270 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

some hundreds of men, after having ridden hard 
since sunrise in pursuit of an elusive enemy, came 
at night to the camping place where they v^ere to 
receive the first meal of the day. Some dry food 
there w^as — not enough to go round; but the 
scarcity v^as nothing compared v^ith the lack of 
v^ater. A fev^ gallons v^ere made into dirty black 
tea and served out to the first comers, and for 
the rest there v^as nothing but burning thirst and 
hunger for another night and day. More than 
one of those strong men turned away sobbing with 
disappointment when they found they could not 
obtain a mouthful of tea. This is what the wealth 
of England and modern military science could 
accomplish ! Our compassion becomes almost 
fever within us as we think of the shame and 
pain of such suffering. We turn to an incident 
in the life of Jesus for which there is as good 
historical evidence as for any other, and watch 
with what incomparable serenity he feeds to 
fulness a weary multitude in a desert place. The 
beautiful order of that feast, the lavish abundance, 
the sober thrift, give it a character which even 
now refreshes our minds and bodies when we think 
of it. Among all that mixed crowd which sat 
upon the grassy slope in expectant companies none 
lacked the appetite of health ; it was the health- 
giver who gave them food. How powerless is 
the modern physician to heal more than a few of 
those who come to him; Jesus had healed all who 
came — all ! ^ 

It is needless to repeat that the means Jesus 

^ St. Luke ix. II-I2; St. Matt. xiv. 14-15. 



CHAP. IX THE NATURE MARVELS 271 

employed in the nature-miracles are beyond our 
knowledge or imagination, and, unlike the miracles 
of healing, they are more marvellous to-day to us, 
to whom the greater works of science are familiar, 
than they were to the simple peasantry before 
whom they took place. Are they incredible ^ 
Every candid mind, even the most sceptical, must 
reply that they are not incredible, although they 
are as yet inexplicable. Nothing is incredible, 
even though inexplicable, as long as our know- 
ledge about it is incomplete enough to leave room 
for the discovery of its place in some sequence of 
cause and effect now unknown. As an illustration 
of a marvel to be credited only because we believe 
it may be explicable we quote an article by M. 
Gustave le Bon on the energy generated by the 
activity of radium : — 

"Parmi les assertions qui ont ete formulees 
dans la discussion sur le radium auquel il a ete fait 
allusion se trouve la suivante enoncee par M. 
Soddy; 'L'emission de Tenergie du radium reste 
un mystere.' 

"Ce mystere est evident avec les idees anciennes, 
mais si on admet la theorie de Tenergie intra- 
atomique que je defends depuis si longtemps, 
Texplication du mystere est en verite tres simple. 
Tous les corps, le radium comme les autres, 
representent un immense reservoir d'energie con- 
centree sous un faible volume a I'epoque de leur 
formation. Seule cette energie peut expliquer la 
vitesse d'emission des particules radio-actives. 

"Et si on demande comment une quantite tres 
grande d'energie peut etre condensee sous un si 



272 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

faible volume, on repondra que rexplication est 
tres simple encore. II suffit d'admettre que les 
elements des atomes sont animes d'un mouvement 
de rotation ayant la rapidite de remission des 
rayons cathodiques, c'est-a-dire, une vitesse 
moyenne egale au tiers de celle de la lumiere. 
J'ai montre ailleurs qu'on pourrait imaginer une 
petite machine pouvant etre enfermee dans le 
chaton d'une bague, et composee uniquement 
d'une sphere de la grosseur d'une tete d'epingle 
tournant sur elle-meme dans le vide avec la vitesse 
indiquee plus haut. Par le seul fait de sa rotation, 
son energie cinetique serait de 203,873 millions 
de kilogrammetres, soit le travail fourniraient en 
une heure 1510 locomotives d'une puissance 
moyenne de 500 chevaux." ^ 

While science is able in these last days to 
soberly suggest potentialities in Mead matter' 
which stagger our powers of comprehension and 
belief, which of us is prepared to affirm of any of 
the marvels of Jesus that in regard to them there 
is no room left for the discovery of natural powers 
and sequences which may account for them — that, 
in fact, we know all there is to know about them ? 
It may be that future generations will find the 
nature-miracles so far explicable as this generation 
begins to find the miracles of healing. Yet in 
these miracles of Jesus, as they stand before us 
to-day, there is a quality of exquisite friendliness 
with nature, human and physical, which attracts 
us as much as their inexplicable mystery repels. 
We are enlightened by them, not as by the clear 

^ The Athenceum, Nov. 17, 1906. 



CHAP. IX THE NATURE MARVELS 273 

shining of a heavenly hght, but as by the glare of 
sunshine breaking through a mist — a glare which 
dazzles while it leaves us bewildered in the cloud. 
At present all we can do with these nature-miracles 
is to concern ourselves with what is of supreme 
importance to us — the part they take in the reve- 
lation Jesus gave through all his signs of God's 
will for man, and the human conditions in which 
that will can work. 



CHAPTER X 

THE CONDITIONS OF PHYSICAL POWER 

There is nothing in the gospel narrative that 
seems to set the ideal of the kingdom more apart 
from the natural life, nothing that clashes more 
rudely with the common sense of the world, than 
the absolute promises Jesus gave that God would 
provide for the personal needs, material as well as 
spiritual, of the true child of the kingdom; and 
the nature-miracles were the most emphatic part of 
that body of teaching by which Jesus enforced the 
duty of a disinterested life. When we examine 
the conditions common to them all, we may find 
that they also teach that God's providence in these 
matters can only operate fully when the disinter- 
ested life of faith becomes corporate. 

The common characteristic of these nature- 
miracles is that they were accomplished only in 
those companies, small or great, which were for 
the time presumably of one heart and way of 
thought, strongly moved by some common innocent 
desire. In the case of the desert feast a multitude 
who, disregarding all other calls, had hung for days 
upon the words of Jesus, had presumably been 

274 



CHAP. X PHYSICAL POWER 275 

welded for the time into a psychic unit. Such as 
were not enthralled by his voice must have turned 
away before. We are told that love for his 
teaching had drawn them on until bodily hunger 
made the danger of fainting imminent. From 
every heart, as from one heart, would arise un- 
spoken blessings on him for the joy of his teaching, 
and an unconscious cry for bread. Then came 
the lavish multiplication of bread and fish. We 
must be thankful that we are told clearly about 
the multiplication of those few small fishes. The 
detail for most minds excludes those transcendental 
explanations which usually belittle what they try 
to glorify. Here, in the solitude of the hills, as 
the thoughts of hundreds of men bless God for 
religious enlightenment, their bodies cry out for 
common food, and the Christ, standing in the 
midst, produces it abundantly, by means to us in- 
visible, inexplicable, and experimentally incredible. 
Take as another example the wedding-feast. 
We know that it was the custom to shut the door 
when the bidden guests had entered. Here, then, 
was another company apart for the time, their 
hearts filled with the simple emotions which the 
occasion called forth. "Joy is the grace we sing 
to God," and there is no occasion that calls forth 
the joy of brotherhood more surely than such a 
festival. Especially in simple peasant life is the 
wedding-feast an hour of heightened emotion and 
enjoyment. Not merely the desire of quenching 
thirst or satisfying the pleasures of the palate would 
make such a company feel solicitous when there 
was a troubled halt among those that served; the 



276 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

pain of the host, of the bridegroom and the friend 
of the brideo;room, would come before their minds. 
Poverty never really weeps till it is checked in an 
act of generosity, never really suffers shame except 
when ashamed to be unable to give. In the midst 
of the common desire evoked by sympathy with 
a generous poverty, the Christ turned water into 
wine. 

Again, let us consider the stilling of the storm, or 
that scene upon the sea in the fourth watch of the 
night when Jesus came to the little loyal band of 
disciples toiling in rowing, distressed by the waves 
and a contrary wind. Here again was the commion 
isolation, and one strong, simple desire for help 
against the elements; the means by which he 
commanded the elements, or the means of his 
coming over the sea, are beyond our ken. We 
have no reason to suppose that had there been no 
isolation of storm and night, had the lake been 
studded with boats of fishermen who had no 
common interest, no conscious desire for his help 
or his presence, he could have done these things; 
just as we have no reason to suppose that he could 
have given wine to the thirsty poor of the indis- 
criminate streets, or bread to any promiscuous 
crowd of beggars, or could, for a sign to the carping 
and faithless theologians who asked for one, have 
cast himself down from a pinnacle of the temple 
without suffering bodily harm. These feats may 
have been possible to his earthly conditions, but 
there is much in the Gospel record against the 
presumption. 

In one case, when he brought back the dead to 



cHAP.x PHYSICAL POWER 277 

life, he shut out from the room all except five 
souls, who must have been shaken with grief or 
intense sympathy; in another he performed the 
same marvel in the midst of "much people of the 
city" who, according to the narrative, had come 
out with the mother, moved, as the emphasis on the 
size of the procession suggests, by the more than 
common pathos of her bereavement. In the raising 
of Lazarus, again, it is specially recorded that Jesus 
waited upon the road until both sisters, and all 
those who were weeping with them, came out to 
him. These could have been no hired mourners, 
for, we are told, their grief so moved our Lord 
that he wept with them. Now, it was not until 
this multitude went with him to the tomb and 
stood around him, that he called Lazarus forth. 
We are told that some of the mourners did not 
believe on Jesus, although many of them did; but 
it would appear from the narrative that, as in the 
other cases, it was not a common belief in him, 
but absorption in some emotion which they had 
in common with him, that made his acts possible; 
in this case there seems no doubt that the mourning 
multitude about him were united in a genuine 
grief — the man Lazarus was evidently bound to 
a large number of his neighbours by ties of unusual 
affection. These circumstances were not enough 
without the faith Jesus exercised in the invariable 
procession of power from God, but they seem to 
have been required. 

If we turn to our Lord's promises concerning 
the marvels that God will do through men in 
answer to prayer, we find that they postulate the 



278 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

same conditions, and his words probabl}' have 
more strict appHcation to the conditions required 
for his own miracles than we have been accustomed 
to perceive. The individual is to isolate himself 
for the hour, or to be gathered with those who 
seek the same end by the same faith; the eye is to 
be single, for a double aim is fatal; the thoughts 
are not to be taken up with thrifty foresight, nor 
do the bodily needs even require expression, or 
more than the merest expression, for the mere need 
goes to God's heart as a prayer; the conscious 
aim of him who prays is to be the "kingdom," i.e., 
the corporate well-being and well-doing. Above 
all, in prayer, if it is to be true prayer, there must 
be no sense of separation from other men; if 
there is so much as a critical judgment, let alone a 
wrong, separating brother from brother, neighbour 
from neighbour, the breach of unity is first to be 
healed : no offence is to be given to, or taken from, 
the world, so that even the external antagonism of 
all evil may be minimised in fact and obliterated 
in thought. This is the epitome of the require- 
ments demanded in the synoptic Gospels of him 
who would seek from God the more abundant life 
of the kingdom whose first law and chief traffic is 
prayer. In St. John's Gospel the two conditions 
of prayer chiefly insisted on are, friendship with 
and invocation of the risen Christ, and love for 
and communion with men, both essential to a 
triumphant result. Here, as always, we have the 
idea of a psychic coalition, produced by common 
intense desire and the inspiration of the spirit of 
the Master. That inspiration creates an assured 



CHAP. X PHYSICAL POWER 279 

expectation that the means will accompHsh the end 
because in harmony with the desire of God to give 
what is asked. This assurance of the marvellous 
result is put forth as sufficient motive to make 
obedience to the law of love possible. 

To sum up. If the marvels of Jesus required as 
their condition a coalition of hearts attuned in some 
sort with the heart of God in that they blessed what 
he blessed, and mourned what excited his sorrow, 
and were in no way perturbed by sense of earthly or 
spiritual antagonism; if we also allow that the pre- 
cepts and promises of the gospel point to some divine 
necessity for the same human conditions in order 
that men of any age may duly experience God's 
inspiration and providence, we are faced with this 
conclusion at least, that if we decide apart from 
these considerations how far it may, or may not, 
be wise or possible to obey the laws laid down for 
the members of this corporate commonwealth, we 
cannot blame the system of Jesus if our Christianity 
appears to fail. If one man alone for an hour in 
his closet has by prayer more strength to help God 
to bless the world than the same man in an un- 
friendly crowd; if in his closet he has strength 
that is of use to God only in so far as he is at ease 
in every relationship and in every respect except 
the need of the hour; if his strength, even in 
solitude, is multiplied by the consciousness of being 
upborne by the mind of others; if two or three 
men assembled in such communion of purpose 
can intensify the power of each to draw on the 
divine help in earthly things ; if by the segregation 
of such smaller associations of minds in a more 



28o GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

widespread unity of spirit and aim whose reality 
and power does not depend on outward and visible 
connection, though it may be expressed and 
emphasised by it, God can actually do for earth 
what he does for heaven, — if all this be indeed 
true, then the unreserved and universal practice 
of the law of love is not only obligatory, — the 
exclusive obligation, — but as the obligation is 
more recognised will become increasingly possible. 
Having seen that even Jesus appeared to require 
a certain psychic atmosphere in order to help the 
needy by his own marvellous hold upon the eternal 
attitude of giving in God, and that this atmosphere 
appears to be such that it would be created in the 
Church if the doctrines of the Sermon on the 
Mount were looked upon as practical, let us again 
consider why it is that we have believed these 
precepts unpractical. We shall find ourselves in 
the never-failing circle of reciprocal cause and 
effect: we do not receive because we have not 
believed; we cannot believe because we have no 
experience of receiving. We suppose the com- 
mands of Jesus to be beyond our obedience 
because we think his gifts beyond our reach. 
There must be faith in God's will to provide for 
man's earthly needs in order to make it possible 
for prudent men to be disinterested. It is right 
that a man should count the cost and consider if 
he is able to meet the enemy; and it is the 
revelation of God's will which Jesus gives in his 
marvellous works which shows that we have enough 
money to build the tower, that we have sufficient 
strength to meet the enemy. The religion that 



CHAP. X PHYSICAL POWER 281 

would save the world must solve the great practical 
question, how to develop the resources of humanity 
to the utmost without those hatreds between man 
and man, that desire for material gain, which in 
the struggle of evolution have been chief factors 
of human development. Jesus recognised the 
command against covetousness as the keystone 
without which the moral arch must fall; he also 
saw that there was a higher law, working even on 
earth, accord with which made it possible to dis- 
pense with covetousness. In the old Eden story 
the curse upon man is not that he must work, — 
Adam dressed and kept the fields of paradise, — 
but that he must exhaust his powers in working 
for his own living, Jesus offered salvation from 
this curse. "Earthly things shall be given you" 
is the promise that illuminates all his commands to 
labour for the meat that endureth. 

We need very seriously to consider what this 
doctrine of Jesus does actually mean in practical life. 
Are we to consider it as an exaggerated figure 
standing for a meagre reality, the offer of only the 
uncertain alms of such good luck as all may ex- 
perience .? Or is it a material figure of spiritual 
help only by which the common circumstances of 
life may be bent to the Christian's purpose ^ Does 
it, in fact, mean only what would be consonant with 
any reasonable forecast of the future which we 
could base on our experience of the past ^ Or does 
it point to a far better state of things than we can 
foresee — a state in which a Church truly meek 
will inherit the earth, and a Church really poor in 
spirit will establish thereon a heavenly civilisation ? 



282 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

If we think the latter view more worthy of the 
Christian faith, are we to expect the estabhshed 
processes of nature to be violated that an unnatural 
end may be accomplished ? or is it more reasonable 
to assume that the unity of nature and the common 
sense of man may prove to be in harmony with an 
order of things even yet a little beyond our pre- 
vision ? The question really resolves itself into 
this, Is it evidence of a sound mind to repeat the 
Christian creeds and believe that Jesus, although 
"very God of very God," spoke at times as an 
unpractical visionary; that he who said, "Let your 
communication be yea and nay, for whatsoever is 
more than these is of the evil," launched into the 
world wild promises which cannot in the nature of 
things be fulfilled ? Or is it more reasonable to 
suppose that he whom we worship may have had 
more common sense than we have yet acquired ? 
He said, "Resist not evil. Give to him that 
asketh. If men take by force give them more 
than they take. Love those w^ho ill-use you. 
Thus and thus only shall ye become the children 
of the highest. Take no thought for the needs 
of your bodily life. God provides. Make the 
interests of the kingdom your supreme end. Thus 
and thus only shall you attain to communion with 
God." 

The Christianity of Christ and that of 
Christendom are in these respects divergent. The 
sword and the muckrake are our earthly means of 
existence. The Church has never laid down 
either, nor insisted on universal friendship as the 
only mode of Christian life. We continue to 



CHAP. X PHYSICAL POWER 283 

wield the sword because the command to love 
universally appears to us foolish. We solemnly give 
this command verbal deference; we repudiate it in 
the name of patriotism, in the name of principle, 
religious and political, in the name of common 
sense, in the name of the Church, and even in the 
name of Christ. Nor has the Church commended 
abstinence from the acquisitive temper; she has 
contented herself with licensing it. She has cried 
that a man does well if, for his nation, his church, 
his order, his family, he covet earnestly material 
gain; and to this proclamation only a few con- 
ditions concerning the laws of property and the 
giving of alms are subjoined. The Church is 
confident in contradicting her Lord because she 
has never caught a glimpse of that inner harmony 
between faith and nature which works to save 
the disinterested man from a pauper's grave. 
She has never held up the birds and the flowers as 
examples for the practical, everyday life; she has 
diligently commended the principle of storehouses 
and barns, and the practice of pulling them down 
and building greater. 

The reason of all this is that, in defiance of the 
gospel, the Church has never conceived of God as 
commonly moving in man's material affairs except 
as the cause of inexplicable disaster or merited 
punishment. "Thy will be done" has been a 
wail, instead of a shout of joyful expectation. 
God has deserved better of us in nature, and a 
thousand times better in the revelation of Christ; 
and yet our saddest hymns, our most melancholy 
moods, have for their refrain the sentiment, "God's 



284 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

will be done"; and we regard "resignation" to 
woe as the highest attainment of the soul before 
God. This is true of the Church in the land of 
Luther, the nation of Knox, the city of Calvin, 
the continent of the Pilgrim Fathers, as it is 
in those regions to which the Greek, Roman, 
or Anglican Churches desire to give exclusive 
light. In none of these branches of the Church does 
the acceptance of God's will suggest any temporal 
advantage; the sentiment that "the visitation of 
God" is direful is writ large, not only in the 
liturgies, but in the legal forms, of Christendom. 
Although the faith of Jesus Christ in the laws 
that govern the higher social and civil life has 
surely found some response in every saintly heart, 
the expression of such faith is vague and un- 
practical compared with the large body of instruc- 
tion which insists that it is only after every decent 
form of money-grubbing has been resorted to 
that the Christian may carelessly throw himself on 
God's mercy for food and raiment; and that, while 
we thank God for material goods, we are con- 
vinced that they come from him in exact return 
for so much toil and cleverness expended in their 
acquisition and for the exercise of that thrift 
which acts as a wholesome moderator of com- 
passion. Thus the divided aim which Jesus 
considered fatal to spiritual life is with us the 
first necessity of Christian respectability, because 
none of the works which he performed, none of 
the promises which he gave to save us from it, have 
obtained credence. 

Failing completely, as we do, to see how the 



CHAP. X PHYSICAL POWER 285 

law of love and of carelessness can be made 
practical, we consistently laud those who give the 
greater emphasis of life's energy to the skilful 
handling of the sword and the muckrake, if only 
they also give some imaginative attention to the 
angelic crown. Indeed, the muckrake and the 
beggar's wallet are our emblems of civic and 
religious duty; to use the one is the common 
virtue, to carry the other is the counsel of perfec- 
tion. In other words, a man must either make 
more money than he needs, or, giving himself to 
public or religious service, take their surplus from 
those who make it. We insist upon taking thought 
for the morrow because we do not believe that 
God has any resources that we have left untried. 
We are sure that the purpose of personal gain 
is needed to develop character and enterprise; 
we are sure, not only that "he that careth not 
for his own is worse than an infidel," but that 
no degree of affiance in God can make the 
beatitudes true in commercial or military or 
national affairs. The aphorisms of Christ only 
apply, we are convinced, to the hidden and 
mysterious life of the spirit which is to be lived 
apart in the soul. Should this inner life wax so 
strong as to burst forth into practice, then error, 
confusion, the pauperism of the individual, and the 
fall of empire, would result. We see all too 
clearly that if the Jewish state of the Christian 
era had loyally accepted Jesus as its ruler, he 
could not possibly have administered its foreign 
policy according to his altruistic principles unless 
he had also been willing to make the stones bread 



286 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m 

and to call for "more than twelve legions of 
angels" for national defence. In domestic affairs 
we are all assured that no adequate meal would 
have been spread for Jesus and his disciples if 
Martha, like Mary, had chosen the better part; 
while there is nothing more self-evident to the 
students of social order than that if the young 
ruler had distributed his property among the poor 
he would have done more harm than good. 

These reasonable beliefs underlie the whole 
civilisation of Christendom. Their influence is 
perhaps most clearly exemplified in the latest 
developments, commercial and political, of our 
youngest nations, where unbridled covetousness in 
the plutocracy and violence and tyranny in trade 
organisations are reaching their culmination. Yet 
these are only the natural flower of roots laid deep 
in the earlier ages when the most respected saints 
urged the Church on to temporal power, and 
soldiers set out uncondemned to advance the 
dominion of the Cross by slaying the Saracen or 
the Christian heretic. These extreme examples 
of the attempt to combine the principles of the 
world with life in the kingdom differ from others 
only in degree; the energy of Christian life is 
yielded to fighting and getting and holding for one 
purpose or another. Our Lord, who condemned 
the standards of Jewish religion while teaching 
that from its ideal the salvation of the world must 
come, must condemn the militant and selfish 
standards of Christendom, even though it is still 
the custodian of his salvation. 

We thus return perforce to the point with 



CHAP. X PHYSICAL POWER 287 

which this book began — that the church or the 
individual is not to blame because it or he cannot 
see how a kingdom with Jesus for its king, and 
his principles as its laws, could exist upon earth. 
It is not our part to see, but to believe and to do; 
and to those who are unwilling to venture this, 
Jesus holds out no other hope of illumination. 
We must still hold in mind — what examination of 
the Gospels makes clear — that every new venture 
of individual faith in the Christ-life will end in 
some apparent failure or martyrdom till the 
corporate faith of the community makes the higher 
success possible. 



BOOK IV 

HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS 



TJ 289 



CHAPTER I 

FASTING AND TEMPTATION 

Everywhere in the records of the nations we 
find historic proof of the widespread hope in a 
time when wrong will cease, when the mad will 
be sane, disease will be abolished, and peace and 
plenty will reign everywhere on earth. The gifts 
of righteousness — amity, prosperity, health, and 
self-control — are the simplest tests of divine good- 
will. The most prolonged and earnest reasoning 
of the religious schools, which have taught that God 
desires to wean men from the world rather than 
to give earthly with spiritual blessing, can hardly 
reason away the expectation ; and the belief that 
such earthly gifts must accompany divine power 
springs unbidden in the heart of the simple. The 
prayer for a deliverer who should bring about 
such conditions of life seems to have been the 
prayer of the men of every nation as soon as they 
were able to give their deepest hope any corporate 
expression. The effort to express this prayer is 
to be found in the magical rites of primitive 
religions. It is painted in the gorgeous pageant 
of the myths of Egypt, Greece, India, and Persia; 

291 



292 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv 

it is woven into heroic legends which He at the 
beginning of each national history; it is the 
unconquerable theme of triumphant prophecy. 
There is a pre-Christian legend . that when the 
Buddha was born to bring the light of truth, the 
blind saw, the lame walked, the sick were raised 
up, the hungry were fed, and a universal peace 
reigned. This only expresses in more detail than 
we find in other nations a universal and deep-seated 
optimism which included both earth and heaven, 
spirit and matter, in its hope. If this deep-seated 
sentiment is of God he who would be the Saviour 
of the world must meet and complete it. 

Side by side with this existed another hope, not 
less universal, not less profound, and in outward 
semblance more high and glorious — the hope of 
attaining heaven by giving up earth, of exalting 
spirit at the expense of matter. The universal 
symbol of this hope was the practice of fasting for 
some religious end. This widespread practice 
affords historic proof of the existence of the 
ascetic ideal in all nations. The ancient Hindoos 
and Buddhists, Egyptians and Assyrians, Babylo- 
nians, Persians and Jews, the Greeks and Romans, 
held their public fasts, and in so far as they fasted 
acknowledged asceticism to be an aid to the 
religious life. If this hope of reaching heaven by 
spurning earth was of God, he who would be the 
Saviour of the world must conform to the practice 
which was its universal symbol, and in his hours 
of physical exhaustion see God most clearly and 
reveal him most fully. 

These two hopes are not in reality consistent 



CHAP. I FASTING AND TEMPTATION 293 

with one another, although they are seen side by 
side in the same rehgions, the same Hteratures, 
and are inextricably confused in the minds of 
many. There is a deep, underlying opposition 
between them. They have a common base in the 
conviction of man's sin and his need of reforma- 
tion, and their common end is man's perfection 
and God's glory; but they hold opposing con- 
ceptions of perfection and of God. 

Between these two hopes, as they struggle 
together in the heart of a nation or the heart of 
a man, there is always a profound questioning. 
The one asks whether it is possible to find the 
Creator except in his creation, whether it is 
possible to be in close communion with God 
without being in close communion with man; 
whether, indeed, man has any right to suppose 
that a God whom he conceives as so far transcend- 
mg his creation as to be indifferent to any of its 
interests, and satisfied with the imperfection of 
any aspect of his creatures, is real and not a mere 
figment of human egotism. The other asks 
whether the infinite God can be apprehended 
through those phenomena which are conveyed to 
us only by the medium of our fallible and tran- 
sitory senses; whether it is not necessary to 
diminish the power of the senses in order to be 
able to ignore the things of sense, and thus lessen 
their hold upon the mind so that it may attain 
to God. 

That Jesus, as he grew in wisdom, pondered 
this great problem of religious hope, and faced it 
fully in the silence of thirty years, we cannot 



294 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv 

doubt. Not only was the law in a measure ascetic, 
but asceticism of a high and pure type held the 
best religious mind of his people. The doctrine 
and life of the Essenes must in some respects have 
had his sympathy. The Baptist drew him by his 
moral fearlessness and high moral standard. The 
Messianic prophecies of his nation were varied, 
some couched in the language of the earthly hope, 
and some suggesting nothing but earthly sorrow. 
It is possible that after the mystic experience of 
new inspiration that came in the act of submitting 
to John's baptism Jesus may have been in doubt 
as to God's will concerning the physical side of 
life. John did not seek to heal the body; and his 
influence made for a higher asceticism almost as 
strongly as for righteousness. 

It is evident that the compassions of Jesus 
were deeply stirred by the bodily and mental 
weaknesses which were the common lot of his 
people. With his perfect health, fasting was the 
only means by which he could gain the experience 
of the vital exhaustion which disease or privation 
brings. The practice of fasting in a desert place 
to attain mystic power was not uncommon. The 
desire to probe physical suffering to its depths and 
know its utmost value as a means of approaching 
God may most naturally have been part, if not 
the greater part, of that driving of the Spirit that 
led him into the wilderness. There he made trial 
of physical weakness. 

We are told by one of the evangelists that the 
devil tempted him all the time that he was 
without food; and all of them agree that when 



CHAP. I FASTING AND TEMPTATION 295 

exhaustion was extreme, eventually bringing with 
it, we may assume, weakened volition, lack of 
control over the imagination — the delirium of 
starvation, the devil's great opportunity came. 
In that hour of intense trial, and in the relief of 
victory when angels ministered to his bodily needs, 
with the insight that comes in each strong crisis 
of a seer's life, Jesus must have made his reckon- 
ing once for all as to the part the flesh played in 
man's salvation. 

What evidence have we of the form his thought 
took ^ Never after his temptation did Jesus be- 
tray any doubt as to what his '* Father's business" 
was with the bodies and minds of men. He gave 
health and strength of body and mind to all who 
would trust him, and unhesitatingly affirmed the 
Father to be the giver of volitional and physical 
completeness, and the devil to be the origin of 
all that troubled it. After his temptation he 
never fasted, or allowed his friends to go hungry 
or thirsty. Very significant is the passage he 
chose to cite from the Jewish scriptures when the 
Pharisees challenged the right of his disciples to 
pluck corn on the Sabbath day. His reply to 
them was that the sacredness of the Sabbath, nay, 
the sacredness of the Temple, ought to be violated 
rather than the body weakened by fasting. The 
thought of the sacredness of the body as com- 
parable to the sacredness of the Temple is again 
emphasised by Jesus when he refers to "the 
temple of his body" — a figure which St. Paul 
repeats. When, where, the Son of Man was 
Lord his disciples should eat; when the hour of 



296 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv 

the prince of this world had come, and he, the 
prince of Hfe, was taken from their sight, then — 
with inevitable relapse into the pious practice of 
an earnest age — his disciples would fast, but not 
in his company. In the one sacred rite he 
originated, in which he would carry over the joy 
of the feast of atonement into his kingdom, the 
form and symbolism he used grew, we cannot 
doubt, out of the intensity with which he realised 
that the unity of mind and body was as sacred as 
the unity of God and man, and was intended to 
guard against that last infirmity of earnest hearts, 
the idea that communion with God may best be 
attained by the disunion of man's physical and 
spiritual interests. That his attitude on this 
matter was impressed on his nearest friends is 
proved by the fact that when to their vision he 
returned from the gate of death they saw him 
eat food or prepare food for them. If this vision 
was subjective merely, it proves that such actions 
were for them the most familiar associations of his 
presence; if the vision was objective it more 
powerfully proves the opposition of Jesus to the 
principle that underlies asceticism. 

How terrible to our Lord, when approaching 
his death, was the remembrance of the time of 
bodily weakness when the devil had been able to 
use the imagery of his pure mind for malignant 
purposes! His phrase "the prince of this world 
Cometh" must have been prompted by the re- 
collection of the fallacious glory of the mountain 
peak and the kingdoms of the earth. Jesus could 
not fear those who could only kill the body, but 



CHAP. I FASTING AND TEMPTATION 297 

he had surely learned by fasting that, as the pulses 
beat low and vital force ebbed, the Evil Will, even 
when he had nothing in common with his own, 
would still have power. When he spoke of that 
"hour and power of darkness" he could not have 
failed to remember the shadow of the deadly faint 
of starvation and the force of the alluring com- 
mands, "If thou be the Son of God, work, as other 
men do, for thine own ends ; use, as other men do, 
thine own powers for thine own help." God is 
seen by the pure in heart while mind retains its 
normal power over brain and body; when this 
control is falling away, then he who has power to 
lead the passing soul to the gates of hell has his 
best chance. It is when the blood ebbs from the 
brain that hope in God is most apt to fail. As 
we gaze upon the cross we hear the very details 
of the first temptation repeat themselves: "If he 
be the Son of God let him save himself." "If he 
has cast himself on God, let him see if God will 
hold him up." In his extremity he was led to 
think that God had forsaken him; the full mean- 
ing of this we do not know, but we see it to be in 
harmony with the belief of Jesus that man's health 
is a citadel of God in this earthly life. 

We cannot believe that Jesus intended to 
endorse, or in any way encourage, the effort to 
increase the divine fire by cooling the embers of 
every earthly hope. Your father in heaven 
numbers the hairs of your head, knows your earthly 
needs, will clothe you like the flowers, and feed 
you as easily as the birds are fed. God so loved 
the world that he gave his Son. All this was not 



298 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv 

teaching to make earth appear unworthy of man's 
love. Whoso gives up father or mother or houses 
or lands for my sake shall receive a hundred-fold 
in this present time. The meek shall inherit the 
earth. The Son of Man w^ho, as he himself said, 
"came eating and drinking," gave man every 
earthly gift except riches, entered by sympathy 
into every earthly joy that was not vicious, offered 
salvation from every earthly care except the care 
of love for the life of men. He never spoke of 
earth as being unfit to be the scene of God's 
heavenly activities. What then ? If he came to 
bring a salvation as truly earthly as it was purely 
of heaven, did he not come also to fulfil the hope 
of those who looked beyond the things of sense 
for their only satisfaction — who felt that earth was 
of no value to them except as a path to heaven .? 
On the contrary it was out of this very doctrine 
of God's care for the body that Jesus educed the 
triumphant certainty of God's faithfulness to man's 
immortal spirit. It is the "how much more" of 
all his parabolic teaching which compels us to 
glorify rather than vilify the lower factor in the 
comparison. If God clothe the grass of the field 
so splendidly, how much more shall he clothe man. 
If his care is so great for the sparrow, how much 
more for man. And the sequence of thought goes 
on : if food is given for the body, how much more 
will the life within be fed. The gift is sacred; 
how much more the altar without whose spiritual 
sanctity the gift would be nothing. Greater than 
the temple is he that dwelleth in the temple. The 
letter is nothing except as the expression of spirit. 



CHAP. I FASTING AND TEMPTATION 299 

Now clearly the whole force of this argument by 
comparison depends on making the most of the 
lesser thing in the comparison. The greatness of 
God's care for the body is the evidence of his still 
greater care for the soul. The inner life and the 
life beyond the veil rise in value in proportion as 
the outer life and the life here is seen to be valued 
by God; and just in proportion to the stress laid 
upon the glory of the spiritual it becomes safe and 
necessary to emphasise the glory of the material. 

In putting the supreme emphasis on the inner 
and heavenly life Jesus emphasised its dangers as 
they were never emphasised before. In proportion 
as the spirit is more than the flesh the sins of the 
spirit are worse than the sins of the flesh. There- 
fore, though God intends man to have moral and 
physical completeness, the Christian will be willing 
to suffer physical ill if so he may rescue his fellow 
from spiritual suff^ering which is so much worse 
than any physical suff"ering. Thus it is that 
human pain becomes a factor in the plan of 
salvation. Jesus declares that in the supreme and 
eternal aspect of his life man may sin most deeply, 
may lose himself; and he holds up the picture of 
this possibility before the eyes of the compassionate. 
It is to the compassion and magnanimity of the 
children of the kingdom that Jesus makes his 
appeal when by his whole example, his every act 
and word, he urges the missionary life on all. 
There is no imitation of Jesus possible outside the 
missionary life; in the exercise of whatever calling, 
wherever he be, always, in speech or silence, in 
action or passion, the child of the kingdom is 



300 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv 

one "sent" to bring the world to God. As a 
missionary a man will always come to hand-to- 
hand grapple with all the forms of pain, for they 
are the instruments of the forces of evil. It is 
the acceptance of injustice and wrong by the 
missionary which drives home his message at last 
to the heart of the unthankful and unjust. Hence 
pain has saving grace, not for him who suffers it, 
but for him who inflicts it upon the innocent. It 
is certainly the salvation of the persecutor that is 
the reward of the persecuted. To be the salt of 
the earth, to be the light of the world, is not a 
personal honour, not a private reward; it is to 
share in the joy and in the pain of God, who 
works for the ultimate perfection of his whole 
creation. 



CHAPTER II 

THE PROTEST OF THE PARABLE 

To be universal a religion ought to be a living 
plant, indigenous to humanity, its roots struck 
far and wide into the heart of this nation and 
that, drawing nourishment from all the ages that 
are past, a thing old yet entirely new, containing 
all that is essential and hampered with nothing 
unessential; for only as it is an essential thing, 
able to enter into the temperaments and necessi- 
ties of every race in every time and place, a 
thing without which nature remains incomplete 
and human nature baffled and unsatisfied, can it 
reach the whole world. 

When the Hebrew tribes left Egypt and 
settled themselves in Canaan, they were on the 
ground where the advanced religions of Egypt 
and Babylonia touched each other; it was also 
the meeting-place of several less developed tribal 
religions. It was bound, by geographical position, 
to be a fighting ground for many nations, to be 
for many centuries traversed continually by 
religions, laws, and customs from Africa, Asia, 
and Europe. The moral gains of the various 

301 



302 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv 

nations of Semitic and Aryan stock were brought 
to Zion, not because of her greatness, not because 
of her poHtical strength, but in spite of her 
insignificance and because of her poHtical weak- 
ness. The Hebrews had the genius for rehgion, 
and "the heritage of the children of the Lord" 
was a school of many nations, in which their 
righteousness was developed, as all strong 
righteousness is, by the choosing of the good 
from all things and the eschewing of the evil. 
If in the conflict of life the Israel of God, tossed 
with tempest and taking no comfort, mistook her 
strength and thought that to eschew the evil was 
the primary duty, it only made the mistake that 
the human heart, corporate or individual, always 
makes till it meets with the great enlightenment 
that transforms the moralist into saint or seer 
and morality into a Gospel of God. 

This mistake made the Jews, in their thoughts 
and literature, assume a separatist position which 
does not correspond with their actual history. 
The Jewish religion — cradled in Egypt, schooled 
in Babylon, its home a pathway of nations, its 
adherents forced to learn the language of the 
Greeks and to comprehend the laws of Rome — 
was formed by God out of the dust of religious 
battle. The "salvation'' which was "of the 
Jews" could have been no strong tower, no house 
of peace, if it had not contained all the energies 
of truth that worked for the development and 
informed the progress of mankind. To be able 
to understand colloquial Greek, to be ready to 
talk with men and to understand what was in 



CHAP. II PROTEST OF THE PARABLE 303 

them, and to be within reach of any great high- 
road of the Roman Empire, were, in the days of 
Jesus, conditions sufficient for acquiring, not an 
intimate knowledge of foreign systems of thought, 
but that fluent essence of each masterful theology 
which passes from heart to heart in beautiful 
imagery, in terse aphorism, and in unexpected 
precept. 

The ignorance of the European peasant has 
been too suggestive in this connection; it has 
often been claimed in our apologetic writings that 
there was a like ignorance among the peasants of 
Palestine when Jesus lived among them, which 
ignorance is urged as a proof of our Lord's 
inspiration. But the ways of God are more 
natural. There could not have been any such 
ignorance in the home at Nazareth. The know- 
ledge Jesus shows of the Hebrew scriptures 
evinces a mental discipline which we have every 
reason to believe was the result of the usual local 
instruction in the law and the prophets. This 
mental discipline comes out in that incident where 
the doctors in the temple at Jerusalem are startled 
with the intellectual power evinced in the questions 
of the child Jesus at the age when curiosity and 
thought begin to develop. These doctors received 
disciples from all parts of the civilised world. 
They were quite able to judge of a boy's mental 
calibre. We have, then, two facts that help us to 
estimate what the mental equipment of Jesus would 
be — the fact of his eager intelligent curiosity, and 
the fact that Galilee, in which he lived, was not 
dominated by that small Jewish school which 



304 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv 

set itself to resist foreign influence. At this time 
the Jews of the Dispersion from every known 
land, proselytes from every nation, who seem to 
have come chiefly from the intellectual classes, with 
traders and political agents, were always travelling 
through Galilee and Samaria to Jerusalem, espe- 
cially to the great annual feast. From the age of 
twelve to that of thirty Jesus travelled once a 
year, making the same slow, pleasant journey on 
this caravan road. We cannot suppose that, with 
a mind full of eager questions concerning religion, 
he would remain ignorant of such things as Gen- 
tile pilgrims could teach. The honourable place 
which he assigns to the Gentiles from east and 
west and north and south in the kingdom of 
God, the incidents in which he repeatedly held 
up their faith as an example to the Jews, are 
consonant, not only with his deep insight, but with 
a knowledge of other nations and other religions. 

Let us consider what the outlook upon the 
world at this time must have been to a Jew 
deeply impressed with the power and love of God. 

In so far as men could worship God by prayer, 
by praise, by oflTerings, by alms-giving and by 
self-discipline, men did worship him. God could 
not be unrighteous to forget their work and 
labour of love — the holy ministry which in some 
form every religion inculcated. A good God 
must have imparted him.self to the worshipping 
millions of his children on earth to the extent 
that they could learn of him, and yet they were 
all disputing as to his name and nature and the 
way in which he was to be approached. Again, 



CHAP. II PROTEST OF THE PARABLE 305 

what the reason of man could do in approaching 
God by the rules and abstractions of metaphysical 
thought had been done. God being eager to 
impart himself to man everywhere and always, 
so far as man by thinking could then attain to 
him he must already have attained; for a further 
step toward God it was not more knowledge that 
was wanted, but a fitter man. Had it been 
possible to frame in human thought an unerring 
presentation of God, a system of worship that 
would be a perfect vehicle of approach to God, 
it was certain that man had no words in which to 
express it, no heart fitted to perceive its perfection. 
It was not a new religion that was needed, but a 
new man — nev/ men better able to know them- 
selves and their fellows, hence to understand the 
simple secret of God. 

There were sufficient data, from the Jewish 
point of view, on which to form these conclusions. 
The Jews in Palestine were only the centre of a 
large and virile nation which had spread itself 
into every place where the Greek or Latin 
civilisation obtained. While the Jews of the 
Dispersion kept themselves ceremonially separate 
from the nations among whom they lived, they 
were everywhere accreting to their religion pros- 
elytes from the thoughtful classes of the heathen. 
The best features of the Jewish religion were, to 
the spiritually-minded, simple enough and pure 
enough to be the means of a much higher national 
life than the world had seen. But the ethics of a 
nation are not to be estimated by the few written 
pages that represent the highest development of 



3o6 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv 

its moral genius so much as by the behefs and 
practices of the majority of its people. The 
exaltation of Greek ethical thought was followed 
by the swift decadence of the Greek race, and this 
is an instance of what is characteristic of the 
religious world at the Christian era. Its attention 
was fixed on all those aspects of life that are 
matter for argument. Philosophers were busy 
trying to probe to the reality beneath appearance, 
but the knowledge they gained was not widely 
applied to life. The Jewish religion, which to 
the spiritual few appeared to have such an un- 
paralleled opportunity for healing the nations, was 
wasting its strength upon fantastic excesses of 
doctrine and ritual and casuistry. The dry rot of 
the literalism and materialistic follies of the school 
that repelled Hellenism were only a little worse 
than the allegorical symbolism of the Hellenistic 
Jews. Everywhere, in its pursuit of God, the 
world was chiefly intent upon what could be spoken 
and written and argued about. And this universal 
disputation between different religions, and between 
different sects within religions, had its worst shadow 
in the proportionate bigotry and narrowness of 
such small sections as agreed among themselves. 

It would certainly seem, from the form his 
ministry took, that Jesus regarded the world as 
famine-stricken, trying to feed upon husks, fight- 
ing with swords and with words concerning codes 
and legends, ceremonies and doctrines, w^asting its 
strength in vain repetitions and much speaking, 
and overlooking what would satisfy and unite. 
Jesus made his great protest against the barren 



CHAP. II PROTEST OF THE PARABLE 307 

strife of religious tongues by refusing to teach 
except in parables. His very explanations of his 
parables were still parables. When he quotes the 
Old Testament he chooses its parables. He never 
spoke of heaven except in figures of earth, or of 
God except in terms of man. "Without a parable 
spake he not." Parabolic teaching has this for its 
very essence, that its form is not essential; all 
that man can speak or write or argue about is 
a dress, and only a dress, clothing an inner truth. 
But the choice of parable as a method of conveying 
truth, although it implies that no particular form 
is essential, also implies that form is important. 
There is no method of conveying thought by 
speech which draws so much attention to the form. 
The form is everything except essential. Another 
form may convey the truth just as well, but to 
convey it as well it must be as beautiful, as simple, 
as true to the conditions of sense and as sugges- 
tive of the spiritual lesson. Here, then, are two 
requisites of the way in which the religion Jesus 
sought to implant must be conveyed to the world 
— it must have an outward form precise and 
beautiful, but the form must never be considered 
essential; there may be many forms. 

We come then to the truth that was to be 
conveyed by this message. It was a life. In the 
ministry of Jesus we meet with nothing but the 
concrete man in a concrete environment. He 
maintained a profound silence upon those aspects 
of religion that could not be brought to the test 
of religious experience. God's forgiveness meant 
the reception of that forgiveness in man's religious 



3o8 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book r' 

consciousness. God's providence was to be tested 
by man exactly as man's providence was tested by 
his child. Man's relation to God is to be appre- 
hended, as he apprehends his relation to his fellow- 
man, in apprehending Jesus. 

Jesus came to m.en who were full of theories 
and wasting their zeal. He said, in effect, it is 
new life that is wanted — the life we now live fuller, 
stronger, raised in all its aspects toward perfection. 
It is more love that is wanted — natural, human 
love, deeper, truer, and flowing into all channels. 
This was not a new idea. It had been the 
transient vision of the highest and lowliest of 
mankind. What was new was the putting it into 
practice, the gift of a perfect life and a perfect 
love to the empty arms and aching heart of the 
world. 

The Christian believes that history vindicates 
the method of Jesus. Just in so far as men have 
partaken of his life bv living it have they com- 
muned with God and blessed the world; just in 
so far as they have loved the Perfect Love they 
have loved the world in deed and in truth and 
given themselves to save it; just in so far as they 
have done this thev have attained to a wider 
outlook and wider knowledge and seen a more 
glorious vision of God. \Mierever the Christian 
has failed it has commonlv been by reason of his 
failure to trust the method of Jesus for himself and 
for his own age. 

The present age in religious matters is very 
like the age of Jesus. How many different 
religions we have ! How many sects within the 



CHAP. II PROTEST OF THE PARABLE 309 

religions ! And those particular sects which claim 
to be the only true sect feel the reaction of their 
contest with the world most by its result upon 
their inward attitude; a degree of bigotry and 
ignorance is forced upon them by the intense 
partisan feeling which is needed to maintain their 
outward propaganda. 

We do not need to turn our attention to a 
better organisation, still less do we want to break 
down such organisations as exist. We want the 
intense realisation, based upon psychological fact, 
based upon the highest inspiration of the prophets, 
based upon the practice and preaching of Jesus, 
that those who offer to God the same thoughts, 
the same desires, the same adoration, have not to 
hope for union with each other — they are in union 
with each other; their union is not to become a 
strength, but is a strength — a strength which no 
outward organisation, having its own sort of 
strength, can increase. We need to realise that 
those who are thus united to one another in 
purpose are at the same time at one with the 
purposes of God, are members of an organism 
whose health and growth are of God, and that the 
consummation of his purposes is sure. There is 
always the need of withdrawing temporarily from 
the things of sense in order to find God. In the 
matter of such union as Jesus taught, we need a 
frequent withdrawal of attention from external 
union. "Neither for these only do I pray, but 
for them also that believe on me through their 
word; that they may all be one; even as thou, 
Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also 



310 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv 

may be in us: that the world may beHeve that 
thou didst send me. And the glory which thou 
hast given me I have given unto them; that they 
may be one, even as we are one; I in them, and 
thou in me, that they may be perfected into one; 
that the world may know that thou didst send me, 
and lovedst them, even as thou lovedst me."^ It 
is here quite obvious that the union of Jesus with 
God was not an outward union. The glory 
which the Father gave him w^as an inner glory of 
the heart which by the sympathetic could be 
observed only in his gracious attitude and bene- 
volent works, and which altogether escaped the 
notice of the officious partisan or blinded devotee. 

All that man can learn of God's truth, by pure 
reason or practical philosophy, by religious systems, 
by outward symbols or by their absence, it is 
certain that man has learned and is learning. 
There is no window of the human heart which 
man opens Godward into which God himself does 
not gladly come. And if in the midst of all these 
we still faint for his fulness of life, we must realise 
that all we can do to attain it is to seek some 
more fundamental condition which evidently we 
still lack. The great reformation of Jesus lay in 
pointing out this fundamental condition and laying 
the whole stress of man's search for God upon 
realising it. 

The supreme duty of fostering the fundamental 
condition of a pure life and a strong determina- 
tion to love will not be denied by the advocates 
of any sane philosophy or any reasonable system 

^ St. John xvii. 20-23. 



CHAP. II PROTEST OF THE PARABLE 311 

of religion. It goes without saying that it is 
necessary to man to give his adhesion at any given 
time to such theory and practice as seem to him 
most reasonable. The living of the Christ-life in 
the spiritual and moral sphere ought not to come 
into collision with the doctrinaires of any school, 
any more than the acceptance of the doctrine of 
bodily health by faith in God ought to come into 
collision with the principles of medical science. 
Just as no physician worthy of the name can do 
aught but rejoice in the actual increase of health 
and strength that any patient may obtain through 
faith in God, so inward life in the spiritual sphere 
by its increase and its greater activities of love 
ought not to distress the most bigoted advocate 
of any religious party. He may desire to divert 
it into channels in which by its very nature it 
cannot flow, but there are channels of love in 
harmony with every Christian system into which 
it can flow, for it is a missionary life, and its 
message is to express God's love. 

Surely, then, looking to the future, we need 
not be deterred from venturing upon the life of 
faith in full accordance with the life and teaching 
of Jesus merely because our imagination fails when 
we try to think in what outward organisation or 
system of worship it could most fitly be embodied. 
It is not matter that forms life, but life that forms 
matter; it is not thought that forms life, but life 
that takes the form of thought. Those who cry 
that without finality in organisation or in thought, 
we cannot have life are expecting the eff'ect before 
the cause. 



CHAPTER III 

THE FIGHTING SPIRIT 

The life which Jesus taught begins its reform with 
the nearest and smallest changes, and they, in their 
turn, bring about the greater changes in ways that 
we can neither see nor foresee. We invert the 
order in our minds, and then cry that we cannot 
accept his rule. For instance, we are faced with 
the entire antagonism of Jesus to the fighting 
spirit; but we do not see how it is possible for 
man to give up fighting. We overlook the private 
possibilities that lie to our hands, and exhibit the 
largest and ultimate part of the problem, asking 
how the world can be rid of international war. 
What folly is this ! Let common sense come to 
our aid, and we shall find it a wonderful echo of 
what we have been calling the visionary ideal of 
Jesus. What advantage is it to the cause of love 
for a man to refuse to fight the enemies of his 
country abroad and stay to fight his brother at 
home .? Or if he refrain from striking his brother, 
is peace the gainer if he nourish ill feeling and 
repeat slanders, even though the ill feeling and 
slander be only political or religious ? Are we 

312 



CHAP. Ill THE FIGHTING SPIRIT 313 

in a position, individual or corporate, that would 
make the cessation of international war a boon ? 
This is the first question to ask. Let us begin at 
home, and each man with his own heart and house- 
hold. And first let us be straight in our thinking 
and afterwards promote peace. The hypocrisy 
only half unconscious, with which we talk about 
our desire to be at peace with all mankind while 
we hate our neighbour, is a tribute to the fact 
that the Christian ideal does not admit of the 
motives that lead to disputes, but is also a proof 
of that loose, emotional thinking which is a worse 
enemy to the cause of Jesus than free thinking. 

What really makes it impossible at present to 
realise the peace of the Christ-life is that we love 
fighting, and that it seems to us exceedingly 
wholesome. How else can we show that we are in 
earnest about anything ,? How else can we defend 
the weak against the strong ? How else can we 
ensure that the right shall prevail .? And when we 
ask ourselves these questions we picture some 
foreign enem.y advancing ruthless against our own 
defenceless hearths, some domestic tyrant oppress- 
ing our defenceless neighbours, and the enemies of 
God despoiling his church and setting up a lie in 
the place of the truth, while we sit indolent, smiling 
upon the transgressor; our blood boils at the 
thought of any man advocating such a condition 
of things, and we all feel ready to die in battle. 

Let us be honest. What living sacrifices have 
we made toward building up stronger conditions 
in church and state and domestic life, in all those 
ways in which we could have sacrificed our lives 



314 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv 

for them without fighting ? If we have done little 
in times of peace except to please ourselves, let us 
realise that, in plunging into every contest, it is 
not sacrifice for some great end, but battle that 
we love. Let us admit that we love it because 
it seems an effective weapon for good, while to 
exercise our powers thus is a pleasurable activity. 
Let us go further, and say that it is good. In 
comparison with a life that is slack and pleasure- 
loving, strife is good; in comparison with a life 
that is only keen for what it can get, warfare in a 
good cause is noble. The energies with which 
nature has endowed man must be developed to 
their utmost capacity. Religion that does not do 
this is not in harmony with the laws of nature 
and of God. 

And the call of Jesus is for all the forces of 
human heroism. He instituted a reformation 
which was to begin in the individual heart. The 
aggregate of such renovated hearts becomes an 
organism which grows within any outward organ- 
isation of state or nation. The problem of inter- 
national war will only become practical when, in 
respect of fighting, the ideal and practice of the 
individual Christian is that of Jesus. What is the 
sequence by which Jesus attains the reformation of 
the individual heart ? Purpose must acquire a 
divine strength; the determination to give must 
dominate the desire to get; the ambition to serve 
must regulate the necessity of being served; the 
desire to receive honour from men must vanish in 
the honour of being a friend of God; and, above 
all, there must be no slovenly thinking, no 



CHAP. Ill THE FIGHTING SPIRIT 315 

hypocritical resting in words that do not represent 
the heart truly. This is the beginning of his 
reformation of the individual heart. The first step 
in the Kingdom, nay, toward the entrance of the 
Kingdom, is strong personal purpose. Something 
has to be done, and all things that hinder are to be 
put aside. When Jesus met the rich man whose 
character had both moral and spiritual beauty, he 
said to him, in effect, "What you lack is strength 
of purpose, a purpose that counts nothing dear in 
order to attain." It is a lack characteristic of 
those who have all they want. The strength of 
purpose which Jesus demanded is too strong a 
vital force to be realised in any one simple maxim 
of conduct, such as that all self-regarding action is 
wrong, all unselfish action right. Hence much 
talk about selfishness and unselfishness is loose and 
misses the mark. In one of his letters the late 
Prof. Sidgwick says, "There is nothing so selfish 
as work;" and in this connection work is the 
expression of purpose. Jesus said of his own 
career, "For this cause came I into the world;" 
the private claims of home and kindred were 
subordinate to his purpose, and his purpose 
dominates the ages. St. Paul's "This one thing 
I do," turned the world upside down. A man 
without a mastering purpose, an over-mastering 
ambition, an unquenchable desire for true honour, 
is a man whose life is not worth giving to God or 
the world. He may as well keep it and make the 
most of it for his own ends — the most will not be 
much. A man who has this force of character and 
uses it for his own ends is represented in the 



3i6 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv 

imagery of Jesus as a better man than the weak 
person who Hves on good intentions, and as in that 
respect a model for him. But undoubtedly the 
great power that Christianity pre-eminently has 
lies in its gift of joy which elicits overwhelming 
strength of purpose and ambition and makes 
heroism from such material as is ignored by other 
moral movements. From the broken reed the 
joy of Jesus evokes the noblest notes of heroic 
music; from smoking flax his breath can bring the 
fire that lights and warms the world. But the 
music must be noble, the fire must reach to heaven. 
The first great work of Jesus is to evoke purpose. 
There must be ambition and unquenchable desire, 
and passion that bends all things to its use. 

Next in the order of Jesus comes the manifes- 
tation of the purpose in life. A reformation that 
begins by evoking the strong flood of positive 
energies in the individual heart will surely break 
through old standards and conventions; it must 
emphasise individuality and produce originality. 
The inevitable result will be that purpose and eff'ort 
will flow into new channels. 

The relation between life and individual differ- 
ence is so close that fuller life must always be 
marked by more individual difference. We over- 
look this partly because opinions formed without 
adequate knowledge are the most annoying, and 
therefore the most commonly observed, outcome 
of the individual difference — opinions which the 
individual vanity is apt to flaunt, like some eccentric 
and absurd personal adornment. A personal 
opinion which in any way controverts the common 



CHAP. Ill THE FIGHTING SPIRIT 317 

opinion is only justified by a more than common 
knowledge of the facts concerned, a degree of 
knowledge which is not within the reach of many. 
Yet although ignorant opinions are the bad bye- 
product of individual reflection, none the less is it 
true that the most widely received truth is a dead 
letter except so far as it receives the individual 
impress. 

The spirit that gives life only manifests itself 
in individuality. This is seen in vegetable and 
animal life; in human life the individual difference 
is greatest. We are told that there are no two 
germs, no two blades of grass, alike : this appalls 
the mind and gives dignity to the dust. The use 
and beauty of this minute diversity we cannot 
comprehend; but we do know intuitively that 
humanity would cease to be human, and God 
cease to be God, if the mill of the universe could 
turn out two men in mind and heart and will the 
same. Two little children who built their toy 
bricks always alike would destroy human hope. 
Two idiots whose senseless habits were alike; two 
men of genius who produced the same epic, the 
same oratorio, the same philosophy; two vain 
women who could make toys of men with the 
same charm or tricks, would pronounce our final 
doom. Gloom, endless gloom, would fall upon 
our hearts if the human duplicate were seen. 

It follows that the religion which begins by 
exciting more intense life in purpose and ambition 
will certainly be propagated by such original 
thought and enterprise as will most fully express 
each man. Hackneyed and conventional activities 



3i8 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv 

will mark its temporary decline, never, as we are 
apt to suppose, its increase. That Jesus did 
make his appeal to force of will and ambition and 
the desire for self-realisation and expression, there 
can be no doubt. His cry was not for common 
men and women but for heroes. He rejected 
men who showed themselves distracted with other 
interests, or slack, or fearful. He called men 
from the hardy, adventurous class; he called for 
men who would fear nothing, who would go 
unhampered by possessions to the conquest of the 
world. He set before them a task the magnitude 
of which made its accomplishment appear quite 
impossible. He left them to exercise their own 
wit in their choice of methods, and he set before 
them a reward which could only be attained by 
faithfulness that reached to death. He held the 
door of this splendid opportunity open, not only 
to the gifted and the free, but to the slave, the 
woman, and the child. The paths of intercession, 
not the least heroic of Christian ways, start from 
the scenes of humblest toil, offering to all the 
forces and originality of the soul an entrance to 
the highest heaven, an influence in the empire of 
the world. 

But further, while Jesus appealed to all that 
was positive and active in the human heart, the 
very formation of purpose, with all its outflow, 
imposes a corresponding restraint. To press 
toward a mark is not only to neglect, but to 
reject, all that hinders. Here it is evident that 
if a man's ambition soars to the salvation of a 
race, he must have a very full knowledge of the 



CHAP. Ill THE FIGHTING SPIRIT 319 

complex conditions of life, or some simple guiding 
principle which carries within it a separating force 
by which to distinguish effective from ineffective 
means. The most complete knowledge of magnetic 
force can only lead men to utilise it by conform- 
ing to its laws, and such knowledge will produce 
magnificent results; but long before such know- 
ledge was thought of, the use of the compass 
enabled every mariner to cross the sea. The 
example and teaching of Jesus is such a compass 
for the man who is simple enough and wise 
enough to accept it; and he from his experience 
can prove that it answers the purpose. In the 
matter of the fighting spirit, the compass has 
not been accepted by corporate Christianity. 
Instead of crossing the sea with the splendid 
audacity of faith, we as a body have determined 
our devious course by hugging the shores of ex- 
pediency, and have suffered shipwreck. 

This brings us to the crown and culmination 
of the change of heart which Jesus works in those 
who truly love him. When a man bends the 
whole force of his nature upon the attainment of 
Jesus, he has the intuitive vision of truth and love 
always at one, never at variance, and with every 
step he takes toward the realisation of the Christ- 
life his vision grows clearer. Such a man knows 
that he has always with him a force greater than 
that of twelve legions of angels ; but he does not 
use his power to coerce or weaken his fellow-men. 
Truth cannot suffer loss. As well slay men in 
defence of the law of gravitation. Love is already 
lost when we draw the sword in her defence. We 



320 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv 

cannot alter natural law or detract from natural 
force; we cannot get away from their dominion. 
By ignorance and disobedience we can suffer under 
them, or lose their beneficent power. It is only 
by making experiment of them that we can learn 
from or honour them; it is only by implicit 
obedience that we can win from them any blessing. 
The salvation of Jesus in the heart of a man causes 
him to realise that truth and love are one, and 
that nothing man can do can alter their dominion 
or gauge their force. It is only by experiment on 
the lines of their force that he can learn or teach 
Christianity; it is only by implicit obedience to 
them that mankind can attain to any further 
good. 

In his earthly day Jesus came saying, "Turn 
from what you are, and what you are doing, to a 
better life, in which God will rule and defend and 
bless you." To-day he comes with precisely the 
same call, "Turn, for the kingdom of heaven is 
at hand." If we have received some elements of 
heaven on earth from our Christian fathers and 
won some advantage for ourselves, we are still as 
far from what is possible to us as was the world 
when Jesus came. To think otherwise is to be 
among the righteous and effeminate for whom 
Jesus has no vocation. 

Every one is needed for some part of the three- 
fold enterprise on which the servants of Jesus are 
sent. All that benefits the body, all that benefits 
the mind, all that makes man one in purpose 
and hope with God, is to be achieved by them. 
What strength, what ambition, what talent, what 



CHAP. Ill THE FIGHTING SPIRIT 321 

honourable impulse, cannot find scope in such a 
task ? Is there not for us, as there was for St. 
Paul, enough to tax the strength and craft, the 
courage and resource, that any man can use in 
the task of saving men rather than destroying 
them ? If the powers of all Christian men were 
thus employed we should not hear of the needed 
discipline of war. And with the progress of ages 
the work to which Jesus sends his servants is seen 
to be greater and more varied. Everywhere on 
the fringes of empire there is constructive work 
and helpful work to be done — a wrestle with the 
forces of nature, a battle with the elements, de- 
mand for the self-control that means also the con- 
trol of untutored men. Everywhere there is an 
army of defence wanted at home for the rescue 
work of the slum. Everywhere companies of boys 
and men, with a hero for a leader — a man who 
can organise and command — can be lifted from 
the degraded and criminal classes to be useful citi- 
zens. There is danger, there is certain failure, for 
men who have not high qualities of courage and 
generalship; but the work is everywhere, and the 
soul of every child born within our civilisation who 
develops only to base uses cries to God against 
the brother who turns his heroism and soldierly 
abilities to a less useful end. In the commerce 
of the world Christ calls everywhere for the spirit 
of financial martyrdom, for commercial heroes 
who, instead of seeking immoderate gain, will 
create in commerce safe paths for the feet of the 
poor and honest. In the present state of things 
such men will almost certainly be crushed to the 



322 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv 

wall, but their followers will profit by their loss. 
In the journalism of the world Christ is calling 
for men who at any cost will refuse to lend them- 
selves as tools to party spirit, political or religious. 
There is no learned profession, no path of humble 
livelihood, where Christ is not seeking for the 
pioneers and martyrs of a newer and better life. 

How many among those who call themselves 
Christian men are working like heroes in the 
building of the City of God .? Perhaps, at a high 
estimate, one man in five hundred. The least 
we can do is to honour those who thus work; 
yet, instead of that, it is these very men — be 
they bishops or missionaries or Salvation Army 
captains — whom we continually criticise, holding 
them responsible for the low standards of which 
we ourselves are the best advertisement. 

But let us be quite sure of one thing — the vital 
force that makes a hero is not mimetic. The 
outward semblance of heroism and sainthood will 
never be in a new age what it was in a former age. 
One chief source of our lifelessness is that we all, 
like the typical milliner's apprentice, want to 
read and dream about some once manly type 
of virtue and honour which by repetition has 
become artificial and therefore vulgar. Sainthood 
must be original or it is not sainthood. In other 
paths of life we acknowledge the weakness of 
imitation; how can we more effectually damn a 
man for any worldly use than by saying, "He 
has no originality, no individual resource" ? 
Why is it that to-day we have few great men 
except in the field of science ^ Largely because, 



CHAP. Ill THE FIGHTING SPIRIT 323 

except in the scientific field, we test greatness by 
a conventional standard. If we could only realise 
this we might perhaps be roused out of the vul- 
garity of our religious conformities and class 
prejudices and paltry expectations. 

Consider St. Paul, whose inspiration as an 
apostle can only be truly recognised by a Church 
that trains all her sons to try to do as much for 
God as he did. His work is still to be done at 
home and abroad. In every heathen country the 
dangers he encountered are still to be met; the 
hardships he suff^ered are still to be endured; the 
success of winning half a continent to Christ is 
still open to men who have his pluck and his stay- 
ing power, his enterprise and his lowly estimate of 
his own righteousness. It is not indeed a great 
store of Christian knowledge or love that is needed 
to start with. If we read St. PauFs letters in the 
order in which he wrote them we shall see how 
his faith and knowledge grew by degrees and with 
much labour. It was not at first but at last that 
he wrote, " I know whom I have believed, and am 
persuaded that he is able to keep that which I 
have committed unto him against that day.'' ^ 

It is private enterprise that Jesus calls for first, 
and the reformation we so sorely need must 
begin in the silence of the heart. When purpose 
is strong, restraint will be as natural as outflow. 
The crying need of the world is not legislation 
but self-government, not the taking of cities but 
the ruling of our own hearts. We are most of us 
set within states and churches which are not 

^ 2 Tim. i. 12. 



324 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv 

governed by the people in them; nor yet by wise 
statesmen and ecclesiastics whom the people could 
blindly trust; they are governed by the media 
through which the people get their information 
of men and things — the newspaper or dema- 
gogue, political and religious. There is some 
saving common sense within us about these mat- 
ters, for we all profess to be a little above party 
belligerence, and to think ill of the man or woman 
who is always redolent of the partisan or sectarian 
newspaper; but we are ourselves the more vulner- 
able to the half-truths we are constantly hearing 
and reading because, while we enjoy them, we feel 
ourselves able to discount their influence. The 
root of the matter is our liking. If we enjoy 
party invective, however clever, however mod- 
erately worded, against any set of men — Lib- 
erals or Conservatives, Democrats or Republicans, 
Socialists or Plutocrats, Romanists or Protestants, 
Anglicans or Methodists, Englishmen or Ger- 
mans, Irishmen or Americans — we are steadily 
cutting ourselves off from the power of truth 
and love. Every day we are less able to see 
what is true, to know what is good, and more in- 
capable of participation in the work of God. The 
newspaper and the demagogue are our servants; 
they are what we make them; that the best of 
them fail to obtain support, that the majority of 
them are what they are, is incontrovertible proof 
of the anaemic nature of our Christianity. Hero- 
ism of Christian purpose requires us to refuse to 
support and refuse to applaud the half-truths and 
invective that we are most ready, by our training 



CHAP. Ill THE FIGHTING SPIRIT 325 

and prejudices, to enjoy. Do we think that Hfe 
would be impossible and intolerable without it ? 
that the State would fail and the Church crumble ? 
Just so did the leaders in Jerusalem think when 
they said that if Jesus continued to live the Romans 
would come and take away their place and nation. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE SWORD AND THE MUCKRAKE 

In the matter of international war the question 
is not to be solved in the present state of affairs. 
Our hope is that in a better state of affairs that 
the future may bring a solution may be found; 
and while we see men on all sides shaking their 
heads and calling such a hope a poet's dream, 
we may perhaps show that it is not an unreason- 
able hope. 

If we go back some thirty years, and find some 
intelligent deliverance upon this same topic, it 
will enable us to see how far and how fast public 
sentiment has travelled. Take Dr. Mozley's 
sermon on war.^ No man could be more clear- 
headed. He finds war vindicated first by the 
fact that patriotism is a duty, and that the man 
who has a conscientious objection to fighting is 
not a patriot. This last statement is made with 
the assurance with which it is now echoed only 
in the jingo journals and the schoolboy's debating 
club. Even thinkers who advocate disarmament 
are not now accused of being unpatriotic because 

^ University Sermons by Canon Mozley, Sermon III. 

326 



cH.iv THE SWORD AND MUCKRAKE 327 

they do not believe in war, the patriotism of the 
apostles of peace having been amply proved. 
Quite recently a French politician, M. Naquet, 
wrote in the Nineteenth Century advocating dis- 
armament for France, but the reviewers, though 
they called him an * amiable visionary,' did not 
suggest any want of patriotism. Dr. Mozley 
admits that Christianity denounces the motives 
which lead to war — rapacity, selfish ambition, 
tyranny, and vanity; but finds its second vindi- 
cation in the fact that it is the only court in which 
the disputes of nations can be tried and decided to 
the satisfaction of both combatants. This part 
of the sermon is as clear a presentation of the real 
difficulty as can be found; but when he proceeds 
to say that, because there never has been an in- 
ternational tribunal to which all nations will 
defer, there never will be such a court, we realise 
that he is writing in the latest decade in which 
a thinker could take it for granted that the future 
must be like the past. The dynamite of the 
theory of evolution had already blown up such a 
position with regard to the future in every strong- 
hold but that of morality and religion; a few 
years later, and the power of the idea, which 
opened the future to unlimited hope, had found 
a place in the religious mind, and no man could 
henceforth stand in a scholastic pulpit and measure 
the possibilities of the future by the past. The 
next argument is still more antiquated, viz., that 
war must have been accepted by Jesus as a neces- 
sity because it was a part of the regime of his time 
and he says nothing against it ! Slavery, trial by 



328 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv 

torture, imprisonment of debtors for life in vile 
dungeons, barbarous forms of executing criminals, 
such as stoning and crucifixion, arbitrary govern- 
ment, and that abomination which has degraded 
every Eastern nation, the farming of taxes — all 
these have the same tacit permission to exist ! The 
nev^ life which Jesus brought into the world was 
the axe which was laid to the root of those trees ; 
as they are cut at the root by the development 
of the Christian life, so one by one in process of 
time they wither away. This we all admit. 

If in a quarter of a century such a change has 
come over the mind of the religious world as 
makes this sermon sound like a mere echo of the 
past, if the necessity for war does not appear to 
be so well established in the minds of men as it 
was but a few decades ago, we must acknowledge 
these are hopeful indications. We do not need 
the calling of meetings, or much talking, or letters 
in the newspapers; still less do we want the or- 
ganisation of new societies. These may have 
their place, but they are not essential. Each of 
us must be resolute to form in his own heart a 
purpose strong enough to mould his own life; 
it is the only way of obtaining a corporate purpose 
strong enough to mould the world. 

We hear of the men of high ideals who in the 
past put their best workmanship into the churches 
and cathedrals they erected to the glory of God, 
and sometimes people sigh pensively as if the age 
of this virtue were past. We are right in feeling 
that the house that we build for the Lord must 
be "exceeding magnifical," but it is a living house, 



CH.IV THE SWORD AND MUCKRAKE 329 

built of thought and feehng, purpose and restraint, 
such as, being handed on to the men of the future, 
will make their lives more beautiful and more 
instinct with the life of God. And the walls of 
this living house are not, can never be, marred 
by the hideous thoughts and emotions born of 
partisan misrepresentations and national animos- 
ities. These, should they touch the house, must be 
burned by the inexorable fire of Love, who is the 
master-builder. 

As we allow ourselves to be deterred from 
realising the kingdom of love on earth by the 
difficulty of imagining how the governments of 
earth can become inoffensive and forgiving toward 
one another, so we allow ourselves to be deterred 
from living the careless, disinterested life of the 
kingdom by our inability to arrange the commerce 
of the world on any other principle than that each 
work to obtain the greatest material advantage 
for himself. We do not, indeed, see how to 
arrange the trade of our own town, or even our 
neighbours' business, upon the lines laid down 
by Jesus. But, after all, that is not what we are 
asked to do. It is not our theories but our life 
that Jesus offers to inspire with wisdom and 
power; nor is it even the life of to-morrow, but 
simply the life of to-day, which he offers to in- 
spire. It is ours thus to obey, and to die if need 
be, trusting to God, whose universal laws in their 
working take account of every individual fact, and 
give it its due influence in the final result. The 
laws of social life, the facts of history, both tell 
us that if any number of men in a community 



330 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book r- 

set themselves to think and to work by some new 
plan or dynamic idea, the future of that community 
is not the same as its past. The commerce of 
the world to-day is more capable of moderation 
and improvement because of every truly disinter- 
ested life which has been lived; and it is by the 
power of such lives that communities are so 
changed that what appeared impossible to one 
generation becomes, to a future generation, a 
necessity of thought and action. 

History shows that, within what we call Chris- 
tian civilisation, the nature of business trans- 
actions between men has undergone changes which 
would have defied any human forecast, and 
certainly tend to a more equal distribution of 
opportunity than did earlier customs. In the 
Middle Ages, to trust your neighbour with your 
money that he might trade with it if you could 
not, and so make a profit both for himself and 
you, was a thing unknown. The man who had 
money, if he could not himself employ it, hid it, 
often in the ground, where it could benefit no 
one. The constant local warfare, the lack of 
any broad basis of trust between city and city 
and nation and nation, made hoarding the only 
m.ethod of storing wealth. There being no legiti- 
mate use for borrowed capital, the honest man 
never borrowed. The spendthrift was the only 
borrower, and the risk attending the transactioi) 
com.pelled the lender to charge a high rate of 
interest, which brought him and his trade into 
sometimes undeserved contempt. How impos- 
sible would it have been for a man of that age 



cH.iv THE SWORD AND MUCKRAKE 331 

to conceive of a time when lending and borrowing 
would be, not merely legitimate, but essential to 
the welfare of the community ! A complexity of 
causes brought about our complex modern credit 
system; a system under which, on the whole, the 
covetous life is productive of more widespread 
harm, while a liberal life can be lived more liberally, 
with wider results for good, and also reproduce 
itself in more widespread benevolence. All that 
is pointed out here is that so great a change proves 
that progress is possible in what seem the most 
settled ways of men. 

All that is good in modern business conditions 
must have come about by the action of the Divine 
Mind upon the corporate mind of man, working 
especially through those who had the laws of fair 
dealing at heart. If, then, men in business life 
should begin more and more to set their hearts upon 
endowing the world with such new commercial 
standards as shall make the acquisition of super- 
fluous wealth a dishonour rather than an honour, 
and all sharp dealing as much to be abhorred as 
is usury now, there is every reason to expect a 
greater difference between the commercial stand- 
ards of to-day and those of a future century 
than obtains between the present and the past. 
Such pioneers w^ould undoubtedly meet with com- 
mercial persecution, and many would need to 
face the loss of all and the worse sorrow of involv- 
ing those who have trusted them. But if the 
Christian hope be true, the right would gradually 
prevail in the very market-place, and on the 
exchange the worship of Mammon would be 



332 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv 

dethroned. Money would become a blessing 
rather than a curse, because the love of money 
would have ceased to dominate the commercial 
mind, and the command against covetousness 
would be reverenced amongst all good men as 
the command against stealing now is. Nothing 
less than this can be the Christian's hope; but 
it will not be attained easily, not by mere hoping 
or pious aspiration. It will need men in increas- 
ing numbers increasingly set on carrying the 
purpose of Jesus into every form of commerce, 
and ceaselessly presenting the desire for the ac- 
complishment of God's will on earth. It is in 
such matters as this that the parable of the unjust 
judge is the stay of those who have the welfare 
of the kingdom at heart. 

The path does not open very far to our sight; 
but there can be no question that there is a treas- 
ure of heaven hid in the field of human com- 
merce, and it is only by selling all that we have 
that we shall be able to gain it. It is not ours to 
dogmatise, yet, among the forecasts of those who 
try to think how the commercial world is to be- 
come the kingdom of our Lord, the extreme 
Socialists seem to be trying to take a shorter cut 
to the end than is the way of Jesus. Total ab- 
stinence from any element in life not in itself a 
vice, unless it be as a temporary and personal 
expedient, seems to be a broad rather than a 
narrow road. Once entered upon, it is easy, 
fatally easy ; it ignores some factor of life, instead 
of moulding it to its purpose. If men are to 
abstain wholly from personal possessions it is 



CH. IV THE SWORD AND MUCKRAKE 2>33 

difficult to see how they can carry out the many- 
sided activities of the Christian ideal. If, for 
example, a man's earthly welfare is secured by the 
laws of the community, how can he exercise the 
virtue of taking no thought for the miorrow ? 
What faith is required to trust God for food and 
raiment ? How can he give away all that he 
possesses ? How, if his portion of goods, and that 
of everybody else, is measured, can he give, or 
take, the overflowing measure which one neigh- 
bour ought to give into the bosom of another ? 

It is commonly said that children brought up 
in some dependent position, having no possessions 
or privileges of their own to give away, are lack- 
ing in the capacity for gratitude. Further in- 
vestigation on this point is most desirable. If 
gratitude, the choicest flower of the soul, only 
blooms in the atmosphere of possession, rooted in 
generosity rather than in receptivity, it would 
seem that to deprive man of the control of pos- 
sessions, even though it be to promote his material 
and intellectual welfare, may be to tamper with 
the very source of his highest life. 

Whether Socialism be a mistake or not, it is 
probably one of those phases through which we 
shall go to the perfect life. History has shown 
that many things "must needs come" and pass 
away. There is, in the evolution of mankind, 
apart from the life of the kingdom, something 
swinging to and fro, like a vast pendulum in the 
clock of the ages, brushing aside first one class of 
men and then another with some appearance of 
secular justice. The priest for generations tyran- 



334 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv 

nises over the people, and the age comes when 
the people tyrannise over the priest. The class 
tyrannises over the mass, and in turn the mass 
tyrannises over the class. The sword has emptied 
the purse; the purse will sheathe the sword in rust. 
Capital has abused its power; labour is scarcely 
a human factor if it does not take its turn of 
privilege and abuse of privilege. When the great 
swing of the clock of time pushes us to the wall 
it is useless to get angry, still more useless to 
whine. The punishments will fall hardest on the 
innocent, but the brave will learn the lessons they 
teach. 

There is always the refuge of the yoke of God, 
the "more excellent way" which St. Paul found 
so good, the way of giving up place and power 
and riches for Jesus' sake before they are taken 
from us. At the same time, it cannot be argued 
that Jesus taught that a man should not have 
possessions, for, although he told one rich man 
to give away all that he had, to another, who 
said to him, "The half of my goods I give to the 
poor," he replied, "This day is salvation come to 
thy house." 



CHAPTER V 

THE PROTESTANTISM OF JESUS ^ 

Jesus undoubtedly taught that men prone to sins 
of the lower nature, as violence and covetousness, 
were not so degraded or so hardened against his 
salvation as those — "perverse and stiff-necked" 
— who obstinately adhered to outworn religious 
beliefs. "Moses we know, but this man we do 
not know," expresses a sin of the spiritual nature 
that left those who entrenched themselves in it a 
prey to deadly spiritual forces from which Jesus 
could not save them. But let us first be clear as 
to what quality it is that Jesus describes as being 
perverse and deadly. It is not the humble caution 
which will beware of false teachers: to that he 
urges his servants, and he gives them a test. The 
test is the good life of the teacher and the good 
fruits of the doctrine; and this test must be 
somewhat rigorously applied, for caution is not to 
be put off its guard by the mere appearance of 
goodness in a would-be reformer. This caution 
and this test are, however, markedly different from 

^ Much of this chapter was embodied in an article in the 

Monthly Review, May, 1901. 

335 



336 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv 

the spirit which rejects the noblest Hfe and the 
best ethical results of any body of teaching simply 
because that teaching does not tally with the 
authority of the past. 

It is this spirit against which the wave of every 
successive reformation must break, and the fact 
that this deadly spiritual sin is a permanent ele- 
ment in the religious nature leads us to suppose 
that the protest against it involved in every re- 
formation must be a permanent need in the 
Church. The attitude of mind engendered by it 
is the most unfavourable to any real revival or 
reformation of religion. How does any true 
reformation begin .? At first like some half-guilty 
doubt, like a thief in the night, some clearer under- 
standing of the Christ steals into one watchful, 
yielding heart after another, until the fleet light 
flashes over all. The recurring prophecy Jesus 
made of that coming of his which would discover 
his servants unprepared, unfit to receive him and 
inevitably degraded by that unfitness, probably 
refers to these hours of glorious opportunity. Such 
an opportunity was his earthly life, and it be- 
hoves us to learn from that what the protest of 
each successive reformation ought to be. 

The argument of this chapter is that Jesus 
Christ expressed an ideal protestantism which must 
be essential to the perfection of the Church ; that 
the nature of right protestantism, as distinguished 
from wrong, can be discovered only by an analysis 
of his attitude toward the sins and errors of the 
religious system of his place and time. 

It is but necessary to consider the Mishna, or 



CHAP. V PROTESTANTISM OF JESUS ^^j 

any sketch of its contents, to see how soul-deaden- 
ing was the legalism which at the Christian era 
entered into every detail of the action of the devout 
Jew of the Rabbinical school. The very fibre of 
his religious performance was of such stuff that a 
revived spiritual impulse could not long make 
his rule of life its expression. The observance 
of the Halakah, the traditional law, was the re- 
ligion of all pious Jews. It has been a popular 
idea that a section only, and they false religionists, 
devoted themselves to legalism, while another 
section, the faithful who were waiting for the 
consolation of Israel, nourished their souls only 
upon psalm and prophecy; but this is not true. 
All religious Jews considered tithings and puri- 
fications and sabbatical exactions as the law 
of God. Deep down where the eye of God alone 
sees the inner man, there was, no doubt, a clear 
distinction then, as in the Church of all time, 
between what may be called "the faithful remnant" 
— the pure in heart, who always see God even 
through the utmost formalism — and those who 
may always be termed religious actors (viTOKpiTai), 
because they are absorbed in accomplishments. 
But as far as Judaism might be seen outwardly, 
it was technical and gross; and if some humble 
souls laid the greater stress upon the inspired 
utterances of their religious poets, the flower of 
the nation — its strength, its youth, its learning — 
sat in the higher Rabbinical schools, where the 
precepts of a literal law were painfully analysed 
and split into more and more shocking puerilities. 
PerhaDs the most accessible information concern^ 



338 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv 

ing this religion is in Edersheim's Life and Times 
of Jesus, In vol. i. chap, viii., we read: "The 
Halakah indicated, with the most minute and 
painful punctiliousness, every legal ordinance as 
to outward observances, and it explained every 
bearing of the law of Moses, but beyond this it 
left the inner man, the spring of actions, untouched. 
What he was to believe, and what to feel, was 
chiefly matter of the Haggadah." Edersheim 
explains that the Halakah was considered of 
supreme importance. Then he adds : " He (Jesus) 
left the Halakah untouched, putting it, as it 
were, on one side;" and again: ** Except when 
forced to comment upon some outstanding detail, 
he left the traditional law untouched." 

Let us be quite clear about this. Jesus pro- 
tested against certain external actions of religious 
Jews. These were not enjoined by the tradition, 
and were condemned by the more thoughtful 
leaders of the legalising party themselves. The 
Pharisaic conscience was already vaguely feeling 
for definition of precisely those vices which he, 
graciously blowing upon its smoking flax, made 
vividly clear. They had already feebly protested 
against the taking of oaths; they had said some- 
thing in favour of secret alms; they had spoken 
of those among them who made a public nuisance 
of their piety as the plague of their sect, and it 
goes without saying that both priests and Rabbis 
knew the illegality of the traflic in the temple 
from which the former reaped so rich an income. 
Now, as to the extremists, "the plague of their 
sect," it may be remarked that there are in every 



CHAP. V PROTESTANTISM OF JESUS 339 

section of the Church at all times men who, under 
the influence of the religious idea, perform deeds 
which to better-balanced minds, who hold the 
same doctrine, appear obviously wrong. Such 
men usually make stock-in-trade of some sort out 
of their sensationalism, and yet would shrink in 
penitence from their selfish motives if they were 
capable of self-analysis. In truest kindness to the 
fanatics themselves, Jesus held up such motives 
to the light; such actions in tenderness for their 
groping conscience he denounced. It is also very 
noteworthy that the most objectionable usages 
were condemned, not for what they were out- 
wardly, nor for the doctrines they involved, but 
because of their motive. Thus the chief criticism 
which Jesus made of religious customs fell under 
the second division of Jewish doctrine; it was 
Haggadic; in which province even the most rigid 
sect of the Jews allowed large option of theory. 
This criticism is mingled with most earnest ex- 
hortations not to break with the existing law, but 
to add to it holiest motive, and with commands 
not to judge others, to beware whom we accept 
as religious reformers, making a good life the test, 
to be more careful to clear our own vision than 
that of our neighbour, to treat others as we would 
wish to be treated, and not to be blatant concern- 
ing our sacred things. 

Thus this polemic of Jesus displays three char- 
acteristics. First, he upbraids only in harmony 
with the conscience of the party he criticises; 
secondly, his criticism refers to motive, so that it 
contradicts as little as may be the sacredness of 



340 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv 

their code; and thirdly, he upholds the authority 
both of code and codifier, conserving for the 
moment the very law that he knov^s his teaching 
must eventually supplant. We shall see that 
these same features characterise his protestantism 
to the end. 

Toward the end, knowing that his word cannot 
then save Judaism from dying in its sin, he again 
lifts up his voice against their customs. But again 
he gives the command to practise and lay to 
heart all that the existing authorities teach, and 
again shows that their teaching is not to be scorned 
but to be improved upon in motive and in heart- 
felt performance; and when he laments the woes 
that will certainly befall the devotees of a mis- 
taken religious zeal, and points out the faults 
which will be the causes of these calamities, it is 
evident that the accusations brought against the 
leaders of the stricter party in the Jewish Church 
are such as would have tended, if heeded, to 
purify that party rather than to break it up. He 
again accuses them of being artificial; and to this 
is added the charge of spiritual pride and the 
zeal that springs from it, the exaltation of small 
distinctions and duties to the loss of the great 
principles of goodness, care for the external life 
where the springs of motives are false, and, last 
and worst, the devotion to dead teachers while 
those who are inspired with the living truth which 
makes for growth are stoned. These warnings 
can be launched effectively against many workers 
in any section of the Church; they are, in fact, 
taken severally and each set forth in its different 



CHAP. V PROTESTANTISM OF JESUS 341 

aspects, the burden of warning breathed by every 
faithful Christian shepherd to his flock. Jesus 
first grouped them all together with consummate 
skill, which displays what we call his religious 
genius; and the fact that he was manifested 
at the moment when the faults of the Church had 
donned their most concrete dress proves, if we 
believe in a divine plan for the religious devel- 
opment of the race, that it was of first impor- 
tance that true religion should be exhibited as 
at enmity with the most natural faults of the re- 
Hgious. But it is impossible for any one con- 
versant with the state of Jewish thought at the 
time to suppose that Jesus intended to dispute the 
general authority of the Judaic tradition for the 
Jews of that generation. Against the supposed 
righteousness of the Rabbinic Halakoth, which 
embodied a most degrading mistake as to what 
constituted obedience to the God of life and love 
— concerning that Jesus says very little. Eder- 
sheim says, "The worst blow he dealt it was that 
of neglect." 

When all polemic was over, when Jesus ad- 
mitted that his message to Judaism as a Church 
had been rejected, what did he do ^ Did he 
oppose himself openly to it, and in his last hours 
with his followers commission them to break with 
it ? We have no indication of such a spirit on 
his part, and clear evidence to the contrary. 
There is no record that the infant Church, even 
when under the fullest inspiration of the descend- 
ing Spirit, conceived of itself as standing upon 
the ruins of Judaism. In this vital period the 



342 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv 

Church exemplifies much that we ought to repeat, 
but of iconoclasm, of the spirit that strikes at 
traditional authority, there is not the sHghtest 
trace. Even the leader of the apostles, the orator 
of Pentecost, had no conception that he was at 
liberty to neglect Judaic restrictions, or welcome 
to Christian fellowship those who remained 
in the environment of other customs. It needed 
vision and voice from heaven repeated three times 
to introduce these ideas; and when introduced, 
long and painful controversies only developed 
them slowly. 

Such, then, was the character of the protestant 
teaching of Jesus; and this protest was the push- 
ing of the large divine goodness against the nar- 
rowness of man's religion. The existing Church 
said, "Obey the letter." He replied, by precept 
and life, "The letter killeth;" and this phrase 
really sums up the whole of his opposition. The 
protestantism of Jesus was only a small, though 
essential, part of his message. The larger share 
of his time was given to preaching that "the 
Spirit giveth life," and the effect of his protes- 
tantism can only be fully understood when con- 
sidered as a part of the total effect of his whole 
teaching, as in the case of any other reformer. 
Two things only as regards this completer view 
can here be noted — that the extreme temperance 
of his protestantism left the more room for his 
constructive work, and that the substance of that 
constructive work consisted in truths which, al- 
though they must eventually break up a dead 
letter, w^ere on such a different level that they 



CHAP. V PROTESTANTISM OF JESUS 343 

did not obviously clash with it. He hid in the 
heart of Judaism a life principle which must 
ultimately break the shell not only of its for- 
mulae but of all successive formulae as they are 
outgrown. 

The result of the temperate protestantism of 
Jesus as applied to the very unfavourable con- 
dition of the existing Church was that the schism, 
when it came, seems actually to have divided 
between the wheat and the chaff, the fruit-bearing 
and the dead trees, the sheep and the goats; this 
cannot be said of any reformation since. The 
Jewish Church, which persisted in antagonism to 
Christianity after the second century, exhibited no 
principle of self-development, which is the test of 
hfe. 

The form of Christianity resembled the form of 
Judaism very closely at first, and changed from it 
very gradually. The new was added to the old — 
that was all, to begin with. The very apostle who 
was fighting to gain for the Gentiles the same 
freedom to exercise their Christian faith with as 
little change of external custom as might be, took 
upon himself a Pharisaic vow in the precincts 
of the daily sacrifice. Had the spirit of the Church 
remained true in all its progress to the example of 
the divine reformer, we believe that all such forms 
of Judaism and heathenism as were not desirable 
would have slowly and gently separated themselves 
and disappeared, as the sere blossom falls when the 
fruit is formed. Instead of this, how has the 
spirit of Judaism, as in this matter it contrasts 
with the spirit of Christianity, triumphed ! The 



344 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv 

persecution which Jesus foretold was perhaps as 
much the result of the evil principle within the 
Church as of the evil principle without her. It is 
of the very essence of Judaic law to believe that 
it is possible to translate God's truth so literally 
into human forms or formulae that the converse of 
those formulae must be false, and therefore that 
God is to be served by the sword of controversy. 
Let us consider, by way of example and con- 
trast, the Reformation of Luther. If he upon his 
awakening had said, "Calamity will certainly come 
upon you, ye saints of the Church, who sell for 
money the remission of sin's punishment," he 
would have carried with him the great body of 
the sober religious of that time. They did not, 
of course, approve of the brutal sale of indulgences 
any more than did Luther, and the closest analogy 
may be observed between them and the pious 
adherents of Judaism in the time of Christ. It 
was that which mediaeval saints did soberly believe 
concerning the rights vested in a visible authority 
which made Tetzel possible; and without their 
genuine goodness, their tears of true contrition, 
their true self-denials and holy motives, the abuses 
of such as Tetzel, and indeed every abuse that the 
great Church harboured, would have been harm- 
less, for men are too literally made in the image of 
truth to lie long in the toils of an unmixed wrong. 
Had Luther gone on to take every abuse toward 
which the conscience of the saints of the Church 
was pointing, were it ever so feebly, and to charge 
it upon the whole Church with bitter cries of woe, 
his protest would gradually have carried all true 



cHAP.v PROTESTANTISM OF JESUS 345 

souls with him. They would have been the last 
to disclaim their responsibility. Rising in the 
might of true goodness that depends upon God, 
they would have responded to his call, and so he 
would have purged the temple. Internecine war 
there might probably have been; the chaff sep- 
arated from the grain by the winnowing fan 
might have eddied and darkened the air; but 
our point is that the fan in that case would ac- 
tually have divided between those who chose the 
grace of God and those who preferred the disgrace 
of the carnal mind. Anything that might have 
been left when a true reformation had been accom- 
plished, would have been as dead spiritually as was 
Judaism when Christianity had finally emerged 
and separated from it — an ashen crust to show 
where fire had been, a shell from which wings 
had taken flight, a sloughed-ofF skin. The true 
Church would have gone on in its continuous life 
to fresh conquests of new truths. That victory, 
once won, would have been won for ever. 

Is it not clear that Luther's attempt to define 
what he supposed to be the converse of the spiritual 
truth which God had given him, and his determina- 
tion to impose this definition upon the Church, 
resulted in this, that when Christendom was split 
by the wedge against which he was heaving such 
heroic blows, the line of cleavage ran not between 
good and evil, saint and sinner, but divided the 
army of the saints pretty equally into two halves ? 
And thus the truth, which is always first concrete, 
a life — a word only in so far as word can be lived 
— was divided also; and God could not be God 



346 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv 

and give the moral victory to either party; the 
V70und could not "heal with the first intention," 
nay, could be nothing but a running sore of battle. 
Error ! If it was an error to conceive of God's 
wrath as being appeased by money given to the 
Church, we can at least conceive such action as 
being an expression, if a mistaken one, of true 
contrition; whereas we should be indeed lost to 
Christian sentiment if we could find the expres- 
sion of any God-given emotion in the rule for the 
highest degree of Pharisaic punctiliousness. Or 
again, what could be the error of calling the 
motherly element in the divine nature by the 
name of Mary as compared with the error of 
conceiving the Almighty as wholly material, as 
himself performing ablutions and wearing phylac- 
teries, as causing the counsels of Heaven to wait 
on the decisions of an earthly Sanhedrim ? If 
it was a crime of the Church to essay the per- 
suasion of heretics by fire and sword, how much 
worse and more material was the — to us — 
fiendish desire of the pious Jew to sweep the 
nations before him from the face of earth and 
hope of heaven, and feast for ever in celebra- 
tion of their doom ! If monastic vows made 
division between nature and holiness, the ideal of 
life and worship which underlay them was at once 
more pure and charitable than any conception of 
holiness in the Jewish Halakah. Among fighting 
men there is perhaps none much greater than 
Luther, yet we cannot suppose that Jesus, who 
left the whole false fabric of Judaic thought and 
practice to perish by its own natural decay, would 



CHAP. V PROTESTANTISM OF JESUS 347 

under any provocation have struck, as at last did 
Luther, at the authority to which all Christendom 
then bowed, subjecting to a to-morrow of anarchy 
millions of sheep who could not as yet comprehend 
the call of a new shepherd. Jesus would surely 
have denounced, as did Luther, the corruptions of 
the Papal Court, which every honest Papist bitterly 
deplored; would have spoken out more strongly 
than did Luther or Erasmus, of enforced vows and 
the utter shame of selling, not only spiritual gifts, 
but mere legal justice, to the highest bidder; but 
he could not have been less tolerant of the ecclesi- 
astical authority of that day than he was of that of 
the priests and teachers of his own time. 

The positive illumination which Luther and his 
followers brought to the Church was very great. 
However mistaken they may have been in their 
negations and destructive policy, their word con- 
cerning God's immediate fatherhood for the 
individual soul, his personal inspiration in it, his 
fostering care of its truth, was a most true echo of 
our Lord's essential doctrine, an application of it 
so necessary to the spiritual growth of the race 
that, resounding through the history of that time, 
we hear the music of the promise, " Greater things 
than these shall ye do." 

Let us mark again, for it cannot be said too 
often, that the attitude of the Church toward the 
reformation always pertaining to her true life 
ought to be that of an open mind, heedful only 
to reject the immoral or insincere in thought, and 
the works that tend to oppose the tender humanity 
of Jesus. Take the great reformation of God's 



348 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv 

truth in physical science in the last century: if 
the Church, seeing the high endeavour of such 
inspired men as Darwin and Huxley, had held 
open her mind from the first to such truth as they 
had to impart, how great would have been her 
gain ! and how great, too, would have been the 
gain to science if such men as these had not left 
the field of their own rich treasure to seek to 
destroy the hidden treasure in the field of the 
Church ! 

It is Jesus, not any other reformer, who is our 
ideal. The true heirs of his gospel are those who 
look to the future rather than to the past for the 
perfect understanding of him; who are able to 
work intensely, by prayer and by such form of 
expression as is given to them, to show forth the 
inexorable quality of the Christ-life. Such men 
are, indeed, the true successors of the Jewish 
prophets, of the apostles, of every true reformer 
within the Church of Rome, in the ranks of his- 
toric protestantism, or nominally outside any 
branch of the Church. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE POWER OF HIS DEATH 

The declaration of the gospel Is this — that God, 
who is life as manifested in love and joy, gives 
himself to man here and now, in and by Jesus 
Christ, who ever receives, ever bestows, what he 
received, what he bestowed, in his brief visible 
ministry. 

The initial difficulty of the human mind in 
accepting the religion of Jesus arises from the fact 
that it seems impossible to us to value what we 
would possess otherwise than by its cost to us. 
We think that the race has had to pay for all its 
gains. The dregs of the struggle of past evolution 
are in our thought, and, using cost as our measure 
— the very opposite of God's measure — we place 
a fictitious value on all things. God makes a free 
gift of the best, and sets a price only on the worst : 
sin he permits to us by measure, because its cost is 
so great. Our highest measure of that cost is 
the death of Jesus; and all pain and sorrow 
wrought by the Evil Will on men or by men, all 
premature death, is part of the cost — God himself 
suffering in all. Life and love and power God 
gives without measure; it is his great joy to lavish 

349 



350 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv 

them on all who hold out the hand of faith. Yet 
faith itself is his gift. We are set in an endless 
sequence; we receive because we believe, we be- 
lieve because we have received. It would seem 
that part of our greatest mistake has been to set the 
simplest and lowest of God's gifts far off in a 
region of miracle and heavenly glory, regarding 
them as the results of the faith that enters the 
higher life, not as Jesus gave them — as the prep- 
aration for that faith. To receive those gifts 
which fulfil our earthly need would be to receive a 
better opportunity to believe that even the love of 
Jesus in its depth will animate us. Yet the gifts 
of God can only be received by a corporate faith. 
One man, be he ever so faithful, cannot rise above 
the faith of the race; he can only lift it higher. 
One corporation, be it ever so pure, cannot hear 
God's voice alone; it can only awaken the world 
and teach mankind to listen. The gifts of God 
are not to man, but to mankind. The Son of 
Man while on earth only received from God what 
he could give to men. The saint can only receive 
from God the gifts he can persuade his brothers to 
receive from him. According to the Johannine 
Gospel the moral necessity for the departure of 
Jesus — "It is needful for you that I go away" — 
was that men could then receive no more from him. 
The lesson of his love to men in forgiveness unto 
death was necessary before they could begin to 
assimilate all the earthly lesson of his life. Until 
mankind believed the earthly things he told them, 
how could they believe the heavenly things he 
should afterwards impart by his Spirit ? 



CH.VI THE POWER OF HIS DEATH 351 

We see him on earth with the eyes of those 
who loved him best. His court is so royal that 
the kings of the world have ever craved its benefits 
in vain. He offers to all suitors, as the first 
and simplest rites of hospitality, the pleasures of 
health, the dignities of self-control. To those 
who enter his banqueting-house his presence 
causes the life that is past to seem poor and dis- 
honourable — its best as well as its worst; but 
to the feast he spreads is added the appetite to 
enjoy; with the banquet is given the temperance 
that blesses its delight. He sets before men a 
standard of service, material and spiritual, more 
beautiful than any other; he points them to a 
spiritual goal farther than any man may see, and 
entrusts to them his great enterprise. He lifts 
them out of all cause of depression; forgives their 
sins freely ; and offers to equip them with strength 
that will make their service jubilant. All his gifts 
are so bountiful that there is no limit to having 
except lack of desire. The only gifts he denies are 
those things whose value consists in their scarcity — 
those things of which, if one man has more another 
must have less, and of which if all had plenty none 
would want any. They are of so sorry a nature 
that they produce more pain than pleasure, the 
love of them being the source of all that divides 
men, causing them to enslave themselves and 
offend their brothers in the mean ambition to 
attain a trivial and transitory good. 

Is there any spiritual joy so high as partnership 
with the Source of love, a share in God's high 
emprise ? — something divine to do, that claims 



352 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv 

every power of thought; physical nature unob- 
served to be rightly observed; a race beloved by 
God to be v^on from the enslaving world-soul 
whose breath is covetousness, whose gift is moral 
obliquity, whose reward is spiritual death ? 

Is there any moral pleasure like the sense of self 
at unity — a unity in harmony with all good ? We 
only know ourselves in anarchy, and cry, ** Happy 
are those who do not know — who yet live in the 
outward look, or govern themselves by the destruc- 
tion of the highest part, or drift only suspecting the 
horror of the internal strife !" But to know one's 
self, and to know all one's powers in harmony, not 
through the destruction of any power but through 
the common guidance of all — that were a salva- 
tion indeed ! There are hours in which we have 
partly attained to such self-control; it is only by 
the sum of such hours that we can conceive of the 
volitional salvation which Jesus offers. 

Is there any material pleasure to compare 
with the pleasure of health ? We have so far 
missed the mark that we hardly know; but there 
is an hour in the spring-time when we feel the 
health of the great earth-mother pulsing in us to 
the renewal of life; there are moments when 
every organ in the body is touched into harmony 
by joy; we look back to the relish of childhood 
for life, and by the sum of all these experiences we 
may try to grasp the bodily joy of the Christ's 
salvation. 

Thus we see the Christ and his salvation — the 
gift of complete joy, of which our faith can yet only 
realise a small part. In the midst of this gospel 



CH. VI THE POWER OF HIS DEATH 353 

of joy is set the death of Jesus, no mere incident 
but the heart and crown of the message of Hfe. 
How large a part of each evangehst's story is this 
death ! How clear and minute is the descrip- 
tion of the trial, the torture, the burial, and the 
resurrection ! How calm and wide is the spirit 
of the narration, tender with love for Jesus, yet 
without invective, without resentment towards his 
tormentors, although these narrations were recited, 
collected, and perfected in the very midst of the 
fierce party conflict between Christians and Jews ! 
It is, above all else, in his death that the power of 
Jesus to forgive is lifted up. As the supreme 
fact of his ministry is his death, so his death shows 
forth our supreme good — divine forgiveness. 
Here only God and man meet. Jesus said, 
"Father, forgive them for there is excuse for 
them.'' We must say, "Father, forgive us as we 
forgive those who torture us." We do not now 
understand this atonement — even our faith grasps 
only a little part of it. Some of us grasp one 
part, some another; and the fragments do not 
join at their edges, nor even indicate how great 
and beautiful is the whole. 

Yet let us rejoice in our gleanings ! It is 
human death that has given us all the thoughts 
we have of an immortal good. If all men were 
yet alive, how indifferent must we be to any hope 
higher than that of earth ! It is love and love's 
forgiveness that raise the standard of blessedness 
on earth and therefore raise the standard of the 
hope beyond earth. Misery makes heaven only a 
place of relief. The nobler, the healthier man's 

2A 



354 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv 

life here, the nobler and healthier his hope of 
heaven. The work of joy for earth which Jesus 
wrought, seen close beside his death in the midst 
of his life — this sight gave a new reality, a glow, 
a warmth, to the world's hope of immortality. 
To share this hope there is no need first to define 
the divine nature. "We needs must love the 
highest when we see it." Having seen him whom 
we worship passing visibly beyond the grave, all 
highest hope and warmest love is henceforth 
centred there. To have seen the mind of Christ, 
the way in which he could forgive, the motive 
from which he served men, all the service he tried 
to render; to have felt ever so slightly his healing 
touch on the body; to have heard, even as in 
sleep, his word that frees the will; to have felt 
the comfort of his presence, is enough at least 
for this — that henceforth the death that passed on 
him is — can in the nature of things only be — 
transition; and that a state where he could more 
perfectly realise his will would have for us the 
beauty of home because our will would be realised 
there. This alone is no small thing. As the 
painter compels the gaze of those who look upon 
his picture to travel and focus where he will, so by 
the intensity and fulness of his life, by the swift 
pathos of his transient death, does Jesus compel 
the hearts of those who love him to hoard their 
greatest treasure beyond the gates of death. 

The very pressing question rises. May we live 
where he is ^ There is, as far as we know or can 
reasonably believe, one law of life in the universe, 
— every living thing must be able to correspond 



CH. VI THE POWER OF HIS DEATH 355 

with its environment, otherwise life passes away. 
How, then, should we be able to survive in the 
spiritual environment of the fuller presence of Jesus? 
How little we know concerning the next stage 
of existence from the teaching of Jesus may be 
vividly brought to mind by the reflection that he 
gives not the slightest indication whether man's 
spirit continues within the material universe for 
an age, or for ages upon ages, endued with some 
other kind of body, or whether its life is no longer 
subject to conditions of time and space. It 
is frequently assumed that none but a materially 
minded man can think of the next life under con- 
ditions of time and space : all that is true is that 
we are compelled by the constitution of our minds 
to believe that reality, the essential self, must tran- 
scend those conditions. There is, however, no 
reason to assume that the self can only exist either 
in the present material body or in a purely spiritual 
condition. There may be a thousand worlds, a 
thousand intervening stages.^ Even if the universe 
of sense be but a dream, it may have many un- 
foldings. The belief that our spirits, after this life, 
pass immediately out of time and space is neither 
necessary to thought nor is it countenanced in the 
Gospels. If the visions of the resurrection life 
were objective the evidence is all the other way. 
The body of the resurrection was certainly as 
material as is light or sound. 

^ "The astronomer has set before us the infinite magnitude 
of space, and the practical eternity of the duration of the uni- 
verse." Huxley's Lay Sermons^ p. 19. See also Appendix, 
note D. 



3s6 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv 

What, then, may we gather from the Gospels 
concerning that stage of existence in which Jesus 
has promised to meet his own, and where his 
kingdom, begun on earth, must be continued ? 
In the Hfe of Jesus we see that his strength of 
desire, his intensity of purpose, his eagerness of 
plan and intention, grew stronger as death ap- 
proached; and we are permitted, according to the 
four records, to see that after having passed 
through death, there was, in this, no change. In 
the visions of himself which he vouchsafed to his 
friends he was still full of passionate desire to 
pursue those ends which he had sought while he 
lived among men, and it was only to those who 
had devoted their all to furthering his ends that he 
then gave his company. The great importance of 
the resurrection-visions for us is their proof that 
death brought no break or discontinuance in the 
character and purpose of Jesus. If it did not 
change him, we have no reason to suppose death 
will, in these respects, change any man. Taking 
up life after death with the same character we 
have here, should we survive in his company ^ 

We turn to his words and ask. What does 
Jesus teach about this ^ The heaven, purgatory, 
and hell which our fathers built so grandly in the 
unseen, with splendid stones hewn from the literal 
interpretation of parable, have faded from our view 
as fade the glowing cloud-mountains of sunrise 
in the increasing light of day. To replace them 
with the imagery of "Paradise" and "Sheol" 
and "Gehenna," taken from the literature in 
circulation at the Christian era, would serve us 



CH.VI THE POWER OF HIS DEATH 357 

nothing. Jesus used these names to convey his 
most serious teaching; the names themselves had no 
one accepted definition; the hterature of the time is 
proof of this. In truth the highest rehgious emotion 
is only awakened by terms v^hich v^ill be found to 
defy definition. Thus the term "glory," except 
v^hen signifying human honour, has only rhetorical 
value, as it is probable that no tv^o men have the 
same notion of transcendental glory. "The end of 
the w^orld," "the creationof the world," "the higher 
life" are terms of the same sort. They can be 
used to convey the most valuable and important 
religious thought, while, at the same time, no 
intelligent man could cavil at the particular prop- 
ositions in which they occurred on any ground of 
scientific inaccuracy. Words of such indetermi- 
nate connotation are useful in turning the attention 
to most vital ideas, which, while necessary to serious 
thought, mark the limit of human knowledge, and 
are the more useful because they mark that limit. 
What, then, does Jesus teach ? The belief that 
all men, in the process of natural evolution, will 
in some far-off end attain to divine bliss, may or 
may not be true; it is neither affirmed nor denied 
in the gospel. The belief that all who reject 
Christian rites and refuse to repeat creeds will fail 
to attain to the joy of Jesus, has still less foundation 
in his words and ministry. What Jesus does make 
very distinct, what he does promise very assuredly, 
is to lead his own for ever onward, to share with 
them all his joy. All that Jesus taught of the 
character of heaven was his own personal character. 
All that he vouched of God was that he had 



358 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv 

the same character. All that he promised for 
the future was that his servants should dwell with 
him. When we have gazed our fill at all the 
rich imagery of the parables, and pondered all the 
poetry of his teaching, we know nothing more 
about the unseen than that the Father's house is 
vaster than we can conceive, and the Father's love 
greater than we can dream; but the great tender- 
ness of Jesus, and the all-embracing love of the 
Father which he constantly recites, do not in his 
teaching justify an inference of universal salvation. 
The death of Jesus, the manner of that death, 
gives to any doctrine of easy and universal bliss 
absolute denial. In the midst of all his teach- 
ing concerning the Father's love and readiness 
to do all physical and moral good to man that 
man could desire in response to the faith that is 
the condition requisite for his working — in the 
midst of this teaching, and after expressing his 
own most earnest prayer to escape premature 
death, we see him suffering an early death in its 
most terrible form. If God be the Father of whom 
Jesus spoke, he would, if he could, have saved 
this son who had served him pre-eminently. 
Whatever else this mean, it means at least this, 
that we are face to face with suffering which God's 
love and power cannot prevent. We reason very 
naturally when we say that God, being great and 
good, could not punish man severely, because none 
of us would carry our anger toward any one so 
much weaker than ourselves to such a length; 
but if suffering be not God's chastisement, it 
is real and terrible, else were such a martyrdom 



CK. VI THE POWER OF HIS DEATH 359 

as that of Jesus impossible.^ In considering the 
ministry and death of Jesus we are forced to turn 
our attention to a destruction of hfe and beauty 
which is inconsistent with any inference we strive to 
make from the goodness of God to the nature of 
his deahng with man. To the materiahst all that 
happened to Jesus is perfectly explained, and as 
historic fact it has adequate explanation for us all; 
but in the religious sphere man, regarding God 
as absolute power and perfect love, cannot find 
adequate explanation for it. The religious heart 
has always demanded an explanation. Every ex- 
planation that has been given may have shadowed 
forth some part of the truth, but the mystery still 
remains. No theory of vicarious suffering does 
more than place the mystery one step farther back, 
and that mystery teaches us this at least very 
clearly, that we cannot argue from God's goodness 
to any assurance of universal felicity. 

One thing, at least, is surely made clear by a 
study of the gospel — the pains Jesus bore must 
have had a purpose quite other than that of satisfy- 
ing God. It cannot have been physical pain or 
physical death that Jesus regarded as a means of 
lifting us to closer communion with God. Lest 
we should think that, we are told that they crucified 
with him two others, one on his right hand and 
one on his left. These suffered, and from the 
same cruel laws; their pain does not lift us nearer 
God. Every page of the world's history is stained 
with blood and vocal with the cries of the wretched, 
and the world is not helped thereby. That Jesus 
* See Appendix, note D. 



360 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv 

shared all this, and, while bearing it, could forgive 
those who inflicted it, is for us the help and lesson 
of his physical pain. What pain he bore and 
forgave as a man is to be the measure of our love 
to men; pain cannot be part of his service to God, 
or of ours. In emphasising God's desire for 
human pain the Christian Church was obeying a 
pre-Christian, ascetic impulse; it was not part of 
her Christian inspiration. 

Jesus, who lived to show us an all-embracing 
salvation, certainly showed us in his death how 
terrible are the powers of cruelty which exist in this 
world and, for aught we know, in other worlds. 
In the death of Jesus the cause is clearly seen to be 
the cruel will of men — men who stood for religion 
and justice. They could have had no power at all 
to do what they did if they had not acquired it by 
virtue of religion and justice. Pilate in the name 
of justice, the leaders of the Jewish Church in the 
name of religion, did this thing. Nor were the 
systems of religion and justice represented fraudu- 
lent; they were great factors of good, and behind 
them both stood the goodness of God. Only a 
superficial sophistry can deny this, or deny that 
cruel and wicked deeds were the frequent result of 
both systems, and that men who lent their wills to 
do these deeds were acting in direct opposition to 
the goodness of God. There was nothing re- 
markable in the way the agents of these systems 
dealt with Jesus. Granted their beliefs and policy, 
they would and must have dealt in the same way 
with any other who came before them on such accu- 
sation and without making defence. The name of 



CH. VI THE POWER OF HIS DEATH 361 

God, the goodness of God, partly expressed in the 
systems which gave birth and character to the men 
who killed Jesus, lent them authority. More than 
that, the life of God created and sustained them. 
It was in God that they lived and moved and had 
their being while they did this dastardly thing. 
This is the Christian faith; that God the Father 
who forgives every returning sinner instantly, 
freely, the Father who can so work on the bodies of 
men that through their own faith the paralysed, the 
leprous, the possessed and the vicious, can at his 
word be made whole and free — this same Father, 
having given his creatures part of his own freedom, 
remains the passive upholder of that freedom in 
its cruelty, while it wreaks destruction on that 
which he loves most tenderly. 

Standing before this awful fact, what reason 
have we to suppose that the moment our souls 
pass beyond this life they will, unless they have 
attained to the kingdom of Jesus, pass beyond the 
power of the cruel will of men ? The men who 
caused the populace to howl and cry for the torture 
and death of Jesus died in their sins — purpose, 
character, beliefs unchanged. What reason have 
we to suppose that such men in the next stage of 
life are powerless to do evil, or are separated from 
all whom they would persecute ^ Further, we have 
no reason to believe that human cruelty is the only 
cruelty, or the most powerful. We have seen that 
the cruel will in man gives a presumption that 
there is a cruel will external to man. Human hope 
has often conceived of this Evil Will as chained in 
every state of being but this; but to this conceit 



362 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv 

Jesus gave no authority. Lazarus was safe; but 
Dives, who seems to have been a fairly well- 
intentioned man with a care for his brothers, was 
tormented — by whom ? and with what sort of 
torment ? That flame is a figure, but even in 
present worldly competition its heat may be seen 
and felt. 

'Tis the gradual furnace of the world, 
In whose hot air our spirits are upcurl'd 
Until they crumble, or else grow like steel — 
Which kills in us the bloom, the youth, the spring — 
Which leaves the fierce necessity to feel, 
But takes away the power — this can avail, 
By drying up our joy in everything, 
To make our former pleasures all seem stale. 

— M. Arnold, Tristram and Iseult. 

Jesus teaches us the Father's love, and how much 
he suffers with the suffering of all his creatures, 
telling us that not a sparrow falls without God; 
this is said in full face of a great slaughter of 
sparrows for the market of Jerusalem ! Consider 
the lilies, which God hath clothed better than 
Solomon in all his glory, and yet on the morrow 
they are to be cut down ! " How often would I have 
gathered thy children together as a hen gathereth 
her own brood under her wings," is one of his most 
exquisite expressions of his love to men; and its 
following word is, "Ye would not. Your house is 
left unto you desolate until ye say. Blessed is he 
that Cometh in the name of the Lord." How 
many generations would fall at Jerusalem before 
that desolate city should arise and bless his name ^ 
Jesus distinctly states that he had good hope of 



CH. VI THE POWER OF HIS DEATH 363 



"saving" the sick, the poor, and the lost, but 
small hope of reaching the whole, the rich, and 
the righteous. There is joy in heaven over one 
sinner that repenteth; but what about the ninety 
and nine over whom heaven has no special cause 
to rejoice — for we cannot conceive that God fails 
to rejoice over moral beauty wherever he sees it ? 
Who, then, are the whole, the rich, and the 
righteous whom Jesus did not hope to save ? We 
meet in his ministry three types of men who 
would seem to be beyond his reach. First, there 
are those who have consistently done what they 
believed to be right, and are mildly desirous of 
conforming to a higher rule of life if they can 
find it. The young ruler, the scribe who asked 
which was the first commandment, probably 
Nicodemus, perhaps Simon to whom the parable 
of the two debtors was told, are examples of this 
class, and we know that a large number among 
the scribes and Pharisees practised a life consistent 
with their moral ideals. Secondly, there are those 
who, finding in themselves a lack of virtue, seek 
to supply the lack by teaching virtue to others. 
They strive to enter into life, but their strivings 
are not in harmony with what is best in their 
own hearts, still less with the higher life that God 
would base on these natural dispositions. Such 
are those who strain at gnats, who ask for a 
sign, who slay the prophets to do God service, 
who say, "I go, sir," and go not. Such in the 
concrete were those priests and lawyers who asked 
Jesus to reprove the hosannas of the multitude, 
who desired his disciples to fast and charged him 



364 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv 

with the possession of a devil, who asked him by 
what authority he cleansed the temple, who com- 
passed his death. Thirdly, there are those who 
break the laws of God and nature and will not 
seek God's grace — such as Judas and the im- 
penitent thief. In these three classes, as seen in 
life around us, we find an aspect of God's provi- 
dence, a psychological problem, that baffles our 
understanding. We meet with men and women 
of the first class who have rational and moral 
beauty as far above that of the average person 
as is the physical beauty of others. Yet in them 
this perfection is not combined with those pas- 
sionate and insatiable desires which cannot find 
ultimate object except in God. They display a 
lack of warmth even in human relationships. This 
type of moral beauty is apt to content itself with 
niceties of morals, refinements of taste, or specula- 
tions about religion. Beginning on a very high 
level, such persons do not grow greater. The 
common sinner, if rising in the scale at all, makes 
great progress. Both nature and the gospel show 
us that God's love is not content with any stage 
of perfection, but delights only in the perfect 
rhythm of endless growth and regeneration which 
constitutes progress. God must love moral beauty 
— the heart of Jesus was drawn to those who had 
kept the commandments. A mother must rejoice 
in the beauty of her child — but if, as in some cases, 
an early perfection of symmetr}^ means that 
her child must ever remain a dwarf, her rejoicing 
is changed to agony. It is in just such cases of 
apparent moral perfection that we realise that to 



CH. VI THE POWER OF HIS DEATH 365 

"need no repentance" is an actual human con- 
dition which makes the higher hfe impossible, 
except in the sense in which all things are ultimately 
possible with God. In the second class we see 
the fanatic, the bigot, the partisan. Domestic 
gloom, ecclesiastical strife, political rancour, are 
the marks of their presence, which spreads no 
compensating sweetness. They, too, are obeying 
their conscience, and we marvel at their obvious 
virtues while we suffer from their ill-doing. 
Thirdly, there are those whose egotism produces 
real moral obliquity on a grosser plane. Criminal 
psychology is proving that there are men who 
literally can "find no place for repentance,'' be- 
cause they actually think conduct right in them- 
selves which would be wrong in another. Such 
men are very often religious, and, as far as we can 
see, incapable of seeking reformation. Jesus al- 
ways depicts the "unsaved" as self-righteous, and 
identifies repentance with faith. There is hope, 
from the teaching of Jesus, that beyond this 
world, in drear ages of unsafe and unhappy 
life, unrepentant men may yet discover their 
own need; Jesus always represents the regener- 
ative activity of God as pouring itself into all 
creation except when shut out by the free will 
which refuses to acknowledge its own need. But 
in this life such people appear to us, as to Jesus, 
to be shut out from the higher life by a natural 
incapacity to see and desire it. We are apt to 
think that if we can say that they are not respon- 
sible it is equivalent to saying that no evil will 
befall them: not so did Jesus regard moral 



366 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv 

obliquity; he said that because men could not 
hear and could not perceive they could not be 
saved from v^rath to come. 

If we believe in Jesus we believe that he can 
welcome his own after death to a condition of 
immediate safety, that among his own there are 
multitudes who do not expect his protection, that 
he will prepare a place where their will, like his, 
shall be accomplished by God; beyond that we 
know nothing. All those who do not attain to 
the heaven where God's will is perfectly done — 
and in the teaching of Jesus they are represented 
as at least as many as the saved — may remain, as 
on earth, exposed to destructive forces within and 
without themselves, for there is no ground in the 
Gospels for the supposition that God's will is 
perfectly done in "hell" any more than on earth. 

What, then, are we forced to believe about 
"the righteous" and any others whom Jesus did 
not promise to save ? Certainly this, that not one 
of them falls without the Father, that their failure 
and pain, as long as it exists, must be greater pain 
to him than to them, that he will be as kind to 
them as to those who are saved. Whatever sun 
may shine in the future stages of human life, the 
almighty Father, by the very necessity of his nature, 
must make it shine on the evil as well as on the 
good. Those who are without the salvation will 
remain for a time true to their own character. 
Some will be lost in their self-refinements and 
small attainments. Some will always be seeking 
to save themselves at the expense of any who 
may interfere with their rights or dispute their 



CH. VI THE POWER OF HIS DEATH 367 

religion or policy. Some will more and more be 
devoured by the flames of hatred and covetous- 
ness. Some will constantly wail to God to have 
mercy upon them, when all that they need is to 
be merciful to him by ceasing to put the life 
by which he upholds them to lower uses. Is it 
necessary that life should be put to its lowest use 
for the user to be "lost" in the sense in which 
Jesus used that word ^ Surely not. Outside of 
Jesus most men find their best strength by par- 
ticipation in fighting and gaingetting. They win 
much; they gain much; and there is a mixture 
of good and evil in it all. The good often pre- 
ponderates; and all good, even the most trivial 
and transitory, is of God. For all we know, 
men who seek to live for themselves on earth 
may be taken after death to one and another 
region of the universe where there is work suited 
to their capacities and tastes; they may compete 
for ages upon ages with other living things, as 
the lower lives from which they sprang com- 
peted in the storm of earthly development. Some, 
by their very fitness for violence and sharp deal- 
ing, may survive whole myriads of their kind, 
and become — themselves slaves — monarchs of 
destructive forces. Such lives are led on earth : 
why not on vaster scale in other realms of soul or 
in the pathways of the stars ^ 

There can be no doubt that the only salvation 
Jesus offers is the offer of himself, his own charac- 
ter, his own companionship, his own service of God, 
as the supreme and perfect good. To love men as 
he loved them, to serve them as he served them^ to 



368 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv 

suffer loss at their hands without impatience as he 
suffered, is the only test of his companionship and 
of God's service in the individual life; and his 
only plan for the ultimate salvation of the race upon 
earth v^as by the multiplication of such individuals, 
by the cumulative strength of their corporate life. 
Outside the kingdom of heaven it is not the man 
who most benefits the community in which he 
lives who, in the course of evolution, is necessarily 
fittest to survive, but he who can thrive best upon 
the community. It is not the nation that gives 
most richly to the world, but the nation that can, 
by strength and skill, take most toll of other 
nations, that becomes greatest and endures longest. 
It is not the religious system which leads the 
greatest number of men most quickly forward to 
nobler ends and higher uses whose kingdom in 
this world is most visible, but the system that can 
most effectively coerce the human conscience to 
enrich and to fight for its organisation. If the 
kingdom Jesus founded were under the same laws 
of development, in the same stage of evolution, 
as the kingdoms of the world, his servants, as he 
himself taught, would need to fight. But the 
kingdom he founded is subject to a higher law of 
development. It grows and spreads only by love 
and service ; and when men would use the processes 
of fighting and getting on its behalf it fades and 
fails. In that way they may get much, they may 
win much; but the kingdom for which they 
thought to gain and to win is diminished, its in- 
visible power is withdrawn, its strength is impaired, 
its victory retarded. What is effected by such 



CH. VI THE POWER OF HIS DEATH 369 

methods is only the organisation of some temporary 
army under a false Christ, the building of some 
transient temple in whose inner sanctuary the God 
of love is forgotten. 

In his death Jesus teaches us first this earthly 
thing; when we have understood it we may be 
taught the heavenly meaning of that death. There 
can be no question that had Jesus chosen to invoke 
and play upon party spirit he had the ability to 
save himself. The insight that could give an 
unanswerable answer to every caviller, an adequate 
reply to every questioner, the eloquence which 
could draw the multitude, the indignation which 
could quell the violent and overawe the super- 
stitious — these would have enabled him to form, 
of the noblest in the state, a powerful faction. 
^ Which of us, leading a cause which he believed to 
be the cause of truth against falsehood, of the 
humble against the proud, of the poor against 
oppression — which of us, leading such a cause, 
and having it in his power to arouse a party in 
the state and arm it with the strength of an in- 
vincible enthusiasm, reinforcing it with the ever- 
triumphant hosts of God, would choose to suffer 
repulse, contumely, and the apparent extinc- 
tion of the cause of which he was the champion, 
rather than break the law of love and offer battle 
to his brothers in thought or word or deed .? This 
is the earthly side of the Atonement. It is only 
by such a conception of duty that man can be 
made at one with man. Most of us feel how 

* This passage, and some others scattered throughout the 
book, were first written in letters to The Spectator. 

2B 



370 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv 

powerless we are even to rise to such a conception 
of duty; and to those who have the greatness to 
perceive the strength and beauty of the law of 
love, how far is it possible to fulfil it ? 

Who, then, can be saved ? Which of us belong 
to his kingdom, and live as he lived ? Which of 
us in the historic Church of the past, which of 
us to-day, have, or in the near future will have, 
the fitness to survive in his presence ? Does 
the death of Jesus in any way produce this fit- 
ness in us who have no fitness ? Was his death 
necessary to make even the most contrite heart 
at one with God ? What did he mean by "giving 
his soul a ransom for many," and shedding his 
blood "unto the remission of sins" ? 

We have seen that we do not know what God's 
justice is because we have never seen or conceived 
of any punishment of guilt which did not fall also 
on the innocent; we do not call the punishment of 
the innocent just; we are therefore forced to admit 
that the divine justice is yet far beyond our sight. 
If we do not know what God's justice is we cannot 
comprehend his forgiveness; yet for this we have 
a measure which, however inadequate, gives us a 
little knowledge — "as we forgive them that tres- 
pass against us." In the hour when we voluntarily 
suffer rather than tempt men to sin, when we do 
heartily forgive a great wrong which we might 
punish, we realise, although we cannot explain, 
some part of the forgiveness of God; we should 
have realised more had we obeyed this law in our 
corporate life, but we have not done so. If we 
cannot explain God's justice or forgiveness, how 



CH. VI THE POWER OF HIS DEATH 371 

can we understand God's conception of atonement 
for sin, or the philosophy of the way by which the 
sinner can come into communion with God ? 

Yet when the Christian beheves that the In- 
carnation gives us a perfect earthly life, lived by 
the Christ on earth only in that strength which 
God will give to every man who looks to him 
with a like faith, then he realises most deeply 
that something external to his own endeavour 
must be done to unite him to God as Jesus was 
united to God. It is not prayers or tears or zeal 
or self-loathing or love of man or the vision of 
God in all things, that can do for him what he 
needs. He hungers and thirsts for more life. 
Faith — yes, faith, he knows — will bring this 
life; but his faith fails. He holds out empty 
hands to God and faints with intensity of desire. 
That which lifts him up and satisfies him is not 
the vision of the Christ in vigorous life here on 
earth, or in the resurrection, but the vision of 
the dying Christ, conquering even death with 
love. 

We do not understand how this is, or why. 
All attempts to explain the Atonement may be 
conceived as attempts to answer the defiance, more 
or less conscious, which man's reason offers to 
God. The wrath of man and the meekness of 
God answer and re-answer one another in the 
darkness that shadows Calvary. We cannot yet 
hear clearly what God says; the Church tries to 
hear and to interpret, and through the ages we 
hear her in colloquy with Reason. 

Reason cries, "If God were good he could not 



372 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv 

look upon the sin and misery of man and live; his 
heart would break." 

The Church points to the Crucifixion and says, 
"God's heart did break." 

Reason cries, "Born and reared in sin and pain 
as we are, how can we keep from sin ? It is the 
Creator who is responsible; it is God who deserves 
to be punished." 

The Church kneels by the cross, and whispers, 
"God takes the responsibility and bears the 
punishment." 

Reason cries, "Who is God ? What is God .? 
The name stands for the unknown. It is blas- 
phemy to say we know him." 

The Church kisses the feet of the dying Christ, 
and says, "We must worship the majesty we see." 

In very truth this is almost all the Church, as a 
whole, has said; but within her there is a babel 
of tongues, and m.uch more has been said and 
more feebly. Even what seems to be the essence 
of the Church's belief cannot satisfy the intellect 
if it be regarded as her whole, or her final, word. 

In the belief and practice of the Christian 
Church we find modifications of all the religious 
efforts of which the most ancient history bears 
record. If in estimating the sources whence the 
Christian Church sprang we cannot afford to ignore 
any religious effort the world has known, much 
less can the Christian of to-day afford to ignore 
such inspiration as any period of the Christian 
Church manifests. The modern Christian who 
should think to serve God or man by doing so 
would be as mad as a statesman who should 



CH. VI THE POWER OF HIS DEATH 373 

propose to abolish existing laws and customs in 
order to invent new ones. All that we can be or 
do is the growth of the past. A flower, when it 
comes, is a new thing; but without a plant there 
could be no flower. This is true of each branch 
of human thought; it is also true of the sum of 
human ideas. If Christianity be true, the Chris- 
tian Church must be the product of all thought. 
Its roots are in the furthest beginnings of the race ; 
in the revelation of Jesus it came forth a tender 
plant; all the flower and fruit of the future de- 
pend upon the growth of the plant. 



APPENDIX A» 

No doubt the fact that we can conceive of, and Chris- 
tianity reveals, a God v^ho shares our suffering, though 
not our sin, has caused the Christian Church to pic- 
ture God's attitude tow^ards the one as differing entirely 
from his attitude tov^ards the other. But that the divine 
nature can share v^ith man the results of sin is no proof 
that those results are in harmony v^ith the divine will, 
but rather the reverse ; for in any personality of which 
we can conceive, what is in harmony with the will can 
hardly be called suffering — the pain, at least, must 
be greatly neutralised. We are forced, then, either 
to the belief that when God shares our suffering, that 
suffering at the same time in some way gives him the 
pleasure of harmony, or else that he does not will the 
pain which he is willing to share. 

This argument in itself is not sufficient to prove that 
God does not will suffering, but it does refute the com- 
mon idea that because Jesus suffered his suffering — 
and inferentially all suffering — must have been the will 
of God. 

1 See above, p. 109. 



375 



APPENDIX B^ 

The great strength of Christian Science seems to be 
that it does not attribute suffering, any more than sin, to 
God's will, and has in this respect an estimate of the 
Father's character in harmony with that of Jesus. No 
one can deny that when St. Peter said, "Thou art the 
Christ, the Son of the living God," he said it of one 
who, by word and act, day by day, had clearly proclaimed 
that every bodily and mental disease was in opposition to 
the Father's will, and would vanish with the right exer- 
cise of human faith. It would seem that it was not the 
ability to reason correctly, but a child-hke faith in the 
Father's tenderness and in his enmity to all ill, that Jesus 
regarded as the first qualification for his service, and 
this the Christian Scientist possesses. But the salvation 
at which Jesus aimed was certainly the salvation of all 
the powers of man, and the power of correct thinking 
must be included in that salvation. 

From the resume of Christian Science doctrine which 
may be obtained from its more intelligible writers, it 
would appear that they deny the reality of sin and pain 
in the same sense in which man in his metaphysical 
moments usually finds it necessary to deny reality to the 
sensible universe. Even if it is true that we are bound 
by the necessities of thought to conceive of reality as 
only that which is beyond any condition of time and 
space, this merely shows that the body and all its sensa- 

1 See above, p. I2I. 

37^ 



APPENDIX B 377 

tions, pleasant or painful, must, with the physical uni- 
verse, be regarded as unreal. Christian Science seems to 
make a religious doctrine of half this assertion — viz., 
the assertion of the unreality of pain and sin. Chris- 
tianity, taking account of the facts of the universe as we 
know them, accepts the faith that health is to be dominant 
and that every process of disease may and must be domi- 
nated; but this does not give any colour to the belief that 
in the degree in which the body is real, its diseases are not 
as real as its health, its vices as its temperance. The 
gospel of Jesus deals only with the spiritual in interaction 
with the physical here and in ''the life of the ages," wher- 
ever and however "the life of the ages" may be spent, and 
gives no colour to the behef that here, or in any part of 
the soul's progression, sin and pain have not that degree 
of reality with which other phenomena are credited. 
What is clearly revealed in the gospel is that God, the 
creator and sustainer of all, has a never-changing will 
set against disease, infirmity, and sin, and will re-create 
man in health, strength, and virtue whenever the faithful 
recognition of this gives him entrance. 



APPENDIX C* 

A CONSIDERABLE weight of metaphysical authority tells 
us that in ultimate reality evil cannot exist; and this 
is taken by some modern theologians to indicate the 
absurdity of believing in any positive evil. The greater 
number of metaphysicians insist on the unity of the 
Absolute; and this is held by such modern theologians 
to prove the absurdity of behef in a personal devil. 
They fail to note that exactly in the sense in which the 
logical metaphysician holds evil to be unreal he holds 
good to be unreal — both are relative, both incidental, 
the one has no meaning without the other. Further, 
the argument which proves to him that the Absolute 
is one also removes human personality from the sphere 
of the Absolute. Such theology as that above referred 
to imitates Christian Science by helping itself to half 
the metaphysical conclusion — the unreality of evil, and 
ignoring the other half — the unreality of good. It goes 
further and accepts the metaphysical negation of the evil 
One while ignoring the metaphysical negation of the 
human Many. This is absurd. 

At present the conclusions of metaphysic and religion 
do not seem to tally, and to some minds this is accounted 
for by assuming that their methods are different although 
their provinces are the same. This is a possible view, 
and it impHes that if both metaphysic and reHgion are 
to be justified they must reach the same conclusions; 

1 See above, p. i68. 



APPENDIX C 379 

but that we are forced to regard man's acquisition of 
truth by each method as in process, because the develop- 
ment of mankind and of all that pertains to life appears 
to us to be in process. All that is required for sane 
thought is to recognise that each method of seeking 
truth, being necessary to man's life, must be healthy 
and legitimate, and that while we may therefore expect 
great gain from both, we cannot now know either in its 
perfect stage. At any given time their conclusions may 
be different. 

On this view man, by the method of metaphysic, seeks 
truth by discarding all that can reasonably be doubted, 
and building upon what he cannot doubt only what can 
be proved according to the acknowledged laws of thought. 
As far as possible man addresses himself to this work 
using reason alone. Reason thus employed ever hears 
the voice of eternal truth bidding it — 

carve out 
Free space for every human doubt, 

and to beware, above all things, of the assumptions of 
faith. The conclusions of metaphysic are only justified 
by the absence of any such assumption in the whole 
process, while in religion, on the other hand, man begins 
with the assumptions of faith. His first step here is 
experiment, the experiment of personal dealing with the 
object of his faith. In this experiment he uses his whole 
nature. He makes no progress but by persistent experi- 
ment. His conclusions are only justified or condemned 
by the results of his experiments. Advancing thus, he 
is lured on by the voice of eternal truth, crying — 

I need thy faith, my child, 
That I may draw thee from the seeming to the true, 
Long hast thou been beguiled. 

In any case the religious man must look upon meta- 
physical methods of substantiating truths arrived at 



38o APPENDIX C 

by religion in another way, as a part of the religious life, 
just as any other aptitude or capacity of man must be 
included in the religious life, and just as, reciprocally, the 
experiences of the religious life must be accounted for in 
any satisfactory metaphysic. But he must be honest; 
he must not allow his religious assurance to make his 
metaphysic vague and illogical. As a matter of fact, 
there is no consensus of metaphysical conclusion which 
denies the underlying postulates of the Christian religion 
— that God is a person, and that good is supreme and 
must triumph — although it may be doubtful whether 
any important philosophy gives metaphysical basis 
for these postulates. Even to those metaphysicians 
who accept the conception of reality which extinguishes 
all that is phenomenal, that conception is not a resting- 
place. It is the City of Unrest, or literally, the City 
of Destruction, from which the pilgrim sets out to find 
anew the City of Reality. On the lips of such pilgrims 
the eternal question takes the form. May not person- 
ality within that city dwell, with all its vivid sense of time 
and change and pain and joy ? In other words, we 
believe that if metaphysic is to be justified at all the physi- 
cal universe is not outside its province; it must take 
into account the facts of personality, the love and hate 
which are the most vivid things we know; and appear- 
ance cannot be mere appearance. That which appears 
to be devihsh must be related to reality, because that 
which appears to be godlike must be so related. They 
may not bear the same relation; but if one appearance 
has in any sense reality, all appearance must have some 
reality. It follows that evil is not to be described as 
the mere negation of good. 



APPENDIX D^ 

The popular belief that all men, or most men, after death 
enter upon a condition beyond the reach of sin and sorrow 
is probably a very great advance upon earlier doctrines, 
which attributed the cruelty of the Eastern despot, who 
figures so largely in Jesus' parables, to the heart of the 
Father. The popular idea appears to rest upon two 
arguments — the one, starting from the premiss that God 
is love, argues that he will not inflict prolonged suffering 
upon any of his creatures ; and the other, starting from 
the premiss that there is in man something which asserts 
its entire independence of sense, argues gratuitously that 
death will release all men from that connection with the 
sensible which is now theirs, and further, that because 
sin and suffering are imperfections inherent in the present 
connection with sense, they are peculiar to that connec- 
tion, and we must pass beyond them when we pass be- 
yond sense. 

As Christians we are bound to grant the premiss that 
God is love, and secondly the premiss that the inner 
nature of man asserts its independence of all but God, 
and compels the behef that God and man have as their 
essence that which transcends sense. A Httle serious 
thought will show that neither of these propositions 
justify the popular belief above referred to. 

If suffering, here or hereafter, were inflicted by God, 
we should certainly have reason to argue from the teach- 

1 See above, pp. 355, 359- 



382 APPENDIX D 

ing of Jesus concerning the Father that he would not 
inflict prolonged suffering upon any of his creatures. 
But to hold Christianity in any sense we must believe 
that God permits, for some good end, sins that he does 
not will; and if we assume that suflf'ering is opposed to 
his will as is sin, no argument from his kindness can 
prove that there must be some particular term to sin and 
suffering. Regarding suffering, like sin, as an incidental 
consequence of men's moral freedom, we must assume, if 
suffering is to end for all men at death, either that man 
then has his will by some miracle suddenly made perfectly 
consonant with God's will, or that he ceases to have 
freedom. The latter alternative involves the old belief 
in no further probation; the former has no support in 
the teaching of Jesus nor in the processes of nature. 

The second proposition the Christian is bound to 
grant is that mind must transcend matter, and God and 
man must transcend the material creation. This does 
not give us any reason whatever to believe that the en- 
tanglement of spirit with matter, the unity and absolute 
interaction of mind and sense which is our only expe- 
rience in this life, will for us cease with this life. Grant- 
ing that a purely spiritual existence will ultimately be 
ours, have we, from any analogy of nature, or any in- 
spiration of religious genius, or from what we call reve- 
lation, any ground for believing that the present is the 
only life in which we shall be an integral part of the 
physical universe ? 

The analogy from what we know of progression in 
nature is that whatever persists develops into something 
higher or degenerates. This may afford a presumption 
that man, having obviously risen from something we call 
lower, will, if he persists, continue to develop those 
powers — superior memory, reason, etc. — which differ- 
entiate him from the lower creation and unite him with 
that aspect of God which those powers represent, or that 



APPENDIX D 383 

by their atrophy he will degenerate, not into the primitive 
type from which he came, inanimate or animate, but 
into something with no power of further develop- 
ment. 

The theory of many successive lives of the one per- 
sonality, all equally unconscious of the others, all lived 
on this earth, belongs to an age of thought when the 
Now was as much the centre of time as the Here was 
the pivot of all space. This theory of recurring lives 
without connecting memory cannot prolong itself in 
generations imbued with the idea of the ascent of man. 
Nor can we suppose that man returns again and again 
to this little world, which we now know plays an in- 
finitesimal and indifferent part in the vast ages of the 
suns. What truth underlies this idea needs restating 
to have vahdity, although as it stands it may by some 
occasional fashion be galvanised into transient activity, 
as in what calls itself "theosophy." While we have 
no reason to suppose that man may not lead many 
successive lives in the material universe our new sense of 
proportion forbids us to assume that, having played his 
part on this little stage, he must return to it. If we 
have made any progress in knowledge of the visible 
universe, such progress must be the best inspiration in 
any presumption concerning the invisible life, about 
which, let us repeat, we know nothing. By analogy 
from what we know of development, therefore, we may 
argue that man having acquired consciousness and 
memory, these powers must belong to the higher reality 
towards which he tends, and that in any normal future 
state he will increase rather than lose them. But this 
analogy leads us no farther. 

The undoubted fact that when the change of death 
passes upon the body the life passes from it in a medium 
to us invisible, impalpable, and inaudible, is of course no 
evidence that the life is not endued with a material body. 



384 APPENDIX D 

The universe is full of matter and energy, of which we 
have no sensuous perception, the existence of which we 
only infer from certain results of which we only have 
knowledge from some incidental result. If we consider 
all the time-worn analogies of the resurrection-life we 
must perceive that the butterfly is as material as the 
worm, the dawn as physical as the night, the flowers of 
spring as gross as the black earth of winter. Tennyson's 
suggestion in "In Memoriam" of the immortal soul of 
his friend passing from star to star in the universe, finding 
congenial work in each, — "so many worlds, so much to 
do," — has quite as much justification as any other view 
we may take of our future Hfe, of which we know 
nothing. 

Man's inner mind, when contemplating reality, finds 
nothing more inexplicable or, in a way, absurd, than all 
the complex visible phenomena of his life on this earth; 
it is not in any way more inexplicable or more absurd 
that his spirit should go on leading a life as perfectly 
entangled with other physical phenomena, of which he 
has now no conception, in some other solar system, or 
should continue to lead successive lives of increasing or 
decreasing power, passing through every solar system in 
the universe. 

To return to the second fallacious conclusion drawn 
from the premiss, that the reality in man must transcend 
sense, viz., that sin and suffering are peculiar to our 
present relation to sense, we must perceive that the 
fact that man will ultimately be perfect gives no hint 
as to how many stages of spiritual imperfection he may 
pass through on his way, even if as a separate entity 
he should persist to the end. By experience we learn 
that the higher the nature the more deadly its evil. 
There is no animal that can inflict so much injury upon 
its kind, or on the world, as man, and none that can 
suflfer so much under injury. The more intelligent the 



APPENDIX D 385 

man, the more injury he can inflict and the more he 
suff'ers. Comparing Satan and Adam in Milton's epic, 
and Mephistopheles and Faust in Goethe's drama, we see 
that the poet's insight bears this out, while all theology 
declares that the pride which can uplift itself in stubborn 
inward defiance of the tender influences of God, is a 
more deadly and far-reaching evil than any sensuous vice. 
It is quite conceivable that moral evil in its w^orst degree 
may exist in a non-physical universe. 

We must, then, admit that we have little ground for 
the assumption we have been considering as to the ab- 
sence of sin and sorrow in a future state. 



THE END 



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